


with friends like these, who needs enemies?

by Granspn



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: anyway i'm a hawkbeej truther, as you should know by now, at least two entire chapters of them absolutely at each other's throats, i say as if there aren't going to be, just to be perfectly clear this is not romantic, so that will probably come up, this is a FRIENDSHIP fic bc it's what they deserve
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-13 04:20:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 38,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28897278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Granspn/pseuds/Granspn
Summary: Hawkeye and Margaret are best friends who love and respect each other so much, they just don’t know it yet. so here are some scenes and tales about that. starts from before/during s1 and moves through till s10 or 11. sad in some places, but with a happy ending :)“Margaret hates Hawkeye Pierce. He hates her back.”
Relationships: Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan & Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan/Helen Whitfield
Comments: 48
Kudos: 62





	1. Pierce

**Author's Note:**

> chapter 1 aka the girls are fighting and something like exposition

Margaret hates Hawkeye Pierce. He hates her back. He showed up two months ago and they hate each other and they are currently cowering together under an operating table waiting for the shellfire to fade into the distance. He looks so fucking angry that if it were anyone else she would be scared, but she doesn’t think she’s ever met anyone less capable of hitting a woman. Hitting anyone, probably.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he mutters, and peers out from under the table. A shell lands nearby and shakes the entire building. Something clatters to the floor and narrowly misses his head as he ducks back under. “Shit!” He bumps his head on a sharp corner in his haste to retreat.

Margaret rolls her eyes. He’s dramatic, insubordinate, unpatriotic, cowardly, snotty, and he swears.

“Some angel of mercy you are,” he says, sitting back and leaning against one of the table legs. He puts his knees up and his feet flat on the floor, and uses his legs like armrests. He always sits like he’s trying to be _cool_.

“I’m not here for your benefit, Captain,” she says. She puts her knees up, too, but she draws them in close and wraps her arms around them like she’s bracing for impact. She’s only there because the O.R. was the nearest room to her when the shelling started.

“Tell me about it,” he says dryly. He leans his head forward and interlaces his fingers at the nape of his neck, and sighs.

Maybe she should have more sympathy for draftees. After all, she does this job because she couldn’t stand a life of being forced to do something she didn’t want to. But something about how he seems to think he’s better than all this really rubs her the wrong way, the way he doesn’t care one way or another what happens there, the way he belittles her and their mission here every chance he gets simply because he can.

She refocuses, regroups, and tries not to feel the room shake every time a shell goes off. But _damn_ , if those explosions aren’t loud. She can picture the expression he’s wearing, somewhere on the spectrum between completely uninterested and having the absolute worst day of his life. He should man up. They have it easy back here.

“How you doin’, Major?” he says evenly, without looking up.

“I’m just fine, Captain,” she lies. She hears the pathetic quiver in her voice that she’s sure he’s picked up on. She resigns herself to whatever ribbing he’s about to unleash.

He finally lifts his head again and looks at her, eyebrows raised. “Uh-huh,” he says. “Isn’t that just my luck, getting trapped under a table with the one person on camp who’s just fine.”

“What are you talking about?” she says. “What are you ever talking about?”

“Doesn’t this scare you?” He sounds desperate, terrified even.

“Nothing scares me.”

He stares at her and she can feel him drafting the absolute meanest dig to take at her.

“That is such bullshit,” he says. “Do me one favor, Major, and I’ll do it back. Don’t lie to me. Okay?” 

He showed up two months ago and he’s giving her an ultimatum about honesty, but what the hell do they owe each other?

A spate of shells go off in quick succession. They both duck down and scoot away from the edges of the table, though she only notices he’s done that as well when the tips of their boots touch. He doesn’t feel it, or if he does, he doesn’t acknowledge it. But he doesn’t move, either. When the dust settles they both look up and exhale.

“Hey,” he breathes. He grabs her right forearm in his opposite hand. “You’re okay.”

She swallows, and nods. “You, too,” she says. “You, too.”

They stay like that for a long moment, just breathing. He looks like he needs something from her but she doesn’t know what. Eventually he seems to realize just how desperately he’s been clutching her and he lets go, and pushes himself back against the table leg. He combs through his hair with his fingers.

 _That wasn’t so hard, was it?_ she thinks. _Treating me with a little humanity._ He looks so scared it’s almost pathetic.

“Are you frightened, Captain?”

“Yeah,” he answers almost immediately. “Of course I am, I’m seconds away from being shipped back to my father in a pine box. Yes, I’m frightened. I’m also afraid, terrified, horrified, petrified, and scared out of my sick little mind, and if you’re not, then I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you, and I’ve got a lousy arm.”

It shocks her, how upfront he is about his fear. He hasn’t done anything in the last two months to hide his disgust, his utter distaste for the war and the army, but he never really seemed scared before. She’s halfway between deciding whether to comfort him or chastise him when the door bursts open and McIntyre tumbles in.

“Trap!” Pierce exclaims.

“Hawk? Is that you?”

“Yes, it’s– ah!– it’s me.” He hits his head again in his eagerness to pull McIntyre under the table with them.

“Oh, howdy, Major,” McIntyre says when he sees she’s there, too. “Hope I’m not, uh, interrupting anything.” He flicks his eyebrows and grins. Pierce, to his credit, just rolls his eyes.

“Would you get over here? You’re gonna get your ass blown off, and it’s your best feature.” He draws McIntyre close into his side and holds him there. He looks a lot happier already. These hooligans do not belong in the army.

Sometimes Margaret feels like she’s spent her whole life contorting herself so men will take her seriously. She used to tell jokes only to be told men don’t like funny women. She used to laugh, and dance on tables, and sing along to the jukebox only to be told men don’t like a ditz. She used to be a cadet, and a lieutenant, and a captain, and she still feels like her father won’t see her until she outranks him. But after all this time she’s finally made herself into a woman who garners respect, and now this joker comes along and thinks he’s so special and won’t give it to her, even though she’s earned it. Because even with all her years of practice, the way she’s trained herself to know just what men want from her, there is absolutely nothing she can do to get Pierce to take her seriously, and whatever he has, it’s catching.

Pierce does everything while seeming like he couldn’t care less. He’s so casual, even when he’s operating, except… Yes, he goofs around and makes it look easy, but when he has a boy on that table he is the most impressive person she’s ever seen. It’s mind boggling and downright infuriating how he manages to care and not care at the same time. He should just pick one. He’s unmilitary, and everyone likes him, and she worries that he is singlehandedly going to ruin whatever reputation she’s built for herself in this man’s army.

Two months ago, a lanky… corpsman? is ambling through the compound as her jeep pulls up and he makes absolutely no attempt to greet her. She’d been in Seoul haggling for supplies for them for hours, the least that numbskull Colonel Blake could’ve done is organize someone to help her now that she’s back. Eventually he seems to hear the commotion and turns around. He’s wearing an officer’s shirt but no insignia, and he’s got desperately gray bags under his eyes and looks as if he hasn’t shaved in days.

“Oh, Corpsman!” she calls for him, not knowing his rank. He just turns back around and keeps walking away. “Hello! You, with the forty-five degree slouch!”

He seems to know what she means as he halts abruptly, his posture straightening. He turns back around and looks at her searchingly.

“Would you help me with these boxes, uh…?” she struggles with what to call him.

“Hawkeye,” he supplies, starting to come towards her. He stands at the side of the jeep with his hands on his hips.

“Hawkeye? That’s your name?” She’s too surprised by _that_ to call him out for not saluting.

“Yeah. Don’t wear it out,” he deadpans. 

“Soldier, where is your uniform?”

“What?”

“Well, whose shirt is that?”

“It’s mine. My mother left it to me in her will.”

“No stripes, no insignia, no salute? What _are_ you doing on this base?”

“I wish I knew.” He smiles. “You wanted help schlepping this stuff?” He grabs a box from the backseat of the jeep.

“‘You wanted help schlepping this stuff,’ _ma’am_ ,” she finds herself saying.

“Oh, there’s no need for that,” he says. “I like to keep things casual.”

“Wha– I– excuse me!” she says, taking long strides to cut him off and stand in his path toward the supply tent. “I am a major in the U.S. Army and you will treat me as such!”

“If I salute now I’ll drop the specimen cups.”

She huffs, and he leaves, and she’s going to have a fit if she sees him behaving normally to any other officer.

At least she doesn’t have to have a fit about that. It turns out that he’s just a maniac. A malcontent. A dissident. And just her luck, he’s a goddamn doctor. She stares at them in the colonel’s office the next morning, Blake, Burns, and Pierce. The bumbling fool, the sniveling idiot, and the bitter draftee. What a way to run a war. They get called in to surgery while the colonel is telling them how often and inconveniently they’ll be called into surgery.

She’s assigned to Pierce’s table. She half wonders if he’s going to apologize for how he acted when they met. She half wonders if she should. She stands opposite him, his first patient under but he’s not moving. He’s taking a deep breath with his eyes closed. Then they open.

“Curved blades, okay?” he says.

“Yes, Captain.”

He recoils slightly at being called that.

“Okay,” he says. His hands are shaking, but he doesn’t look scared. “Scalpel.”

He’s good. He’s really, really good, actually, which is borderline infuriating considering his attitude. He has almost laser sharp focus on the operation while simultaneously nearly constantly talking, cracking jokes, and singing under his breath. It’s like the opposite, or the counterpart, to needing something to do with your hands while you watch a movie or listen to a record; he needs something to do with his mind while his hands are busy. In a way, he spoils her for when the second shift starts and she’s rotated to Burns, who’s the only one around here who’s treated her with any kind of respect since she arrived. Even the way Pierce asks for instruments is a little gentler, a little kinder, a little more “let me get a clamp” and a little less “move it, honey.”

The session feels endless. When everyone is finally safely bandaged out in post-op, she feels Burns’ eyes on her and files away for later the thought that she can probably have him any time she wants. But what she wants now is to find Pierce and tell him how impressed she was, and maybe by that correct some of the bad footing they started off on.

She startles when she finds him on the floor of the scrub room. He looks like he sat down or otherwise collapsed in front of the sink while washing his hands. The water is still running.

“Pierce!” She shuts off the tap. “What the hell are you doing?”

He ignores her.

“Pierce!” she calls again. She takes a step forward and reaches out like she’s going to grab his arm and yank him up, but he looks up at her and sees her coming. Instead of standing, though, he lies down, actually lies down on the floor of the scrub room with his knees up and his hands behind his head.

“Jesus Christ,” he says. “That was unequivocally the worst night of my life. And you’re going to have to believe me when I tell you that’s saying something.”

“That was nothing,” she says.

“Fuck,” he says on an exhale. He closes his eyes and shakes his head almost imperceptibly. “This is such a disgrace. I mean, can you believe we’re only halfway through the twentieth century and already we’re three wars deep. Three! Haven’t we learned anything by now? Anything at all?”

“War is inevitable, Captain,” she says, because it’s what she’s been taught her whole life. How else would you be able to make a career out of the army? War is a fact of life, just like diseases are, and Pierce doesn’t have a problem with being a doctor. That being said, she is frozen in place in one corner of the room since she’s slightly afraid to look him in the eye.

“That would suit you, wouldn’t it? Regular army clown,” he mutters.

“Excuse me,” she says. “But just because I think we have– we have a reason to be here does not mean I’m enjoying it, and I very much resent that implication. Now get up, Captain, before I get you up myself.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “Would you, Major? I do so love to be manhandled.”

She makes an indignant noise and he props himself up on his elbows.

“Well, I never–”

“Listen, Major, I know we only just met, but if you’re anything less than completely disgusted by what’s going on here then I really don’t give a shit about anything else you’ve got to say.”

“There is no need to be so overdramatic.”

“Overdramatic?” He laughs, and finally pushes himself off the ground. “I’ll have you know I am being precisely the correct amount of dramatic given the current situation. Besides,” he brushes past her with his shoulder on his way to the door, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

She’s left wondering what the hell he means by that, and resigned to the fact that this Captain Pierce, this _Hawkeye_ character is going to be capital-D Difficult to deal with for the foreseeable future.

Another surgeon get there the next day, and it’s a blessing and a curse. She thinks she sees Pierce fall in love with him (or something) the second he strides into the mess tent, which means at least he’s off her back for the time being. Good. She needs to focus on something other than the guy who seems determined to make sure every activity occurring on this compound somehow revolves around him.

She tries to get to know her nurses, though they don’t have much to say to her. She unpacks the few civilian clothes she brought and stares at the emptiness in her wardrobe where the her from ten years ago would have been stuffing it to the brim with dresses and jackets and funny men’s shirts with shoulder pads sewn in that Lorraine would say made her look like a modern major general.

She pins some photos up behind her bed, running a thumb over her and Lorraine’s grainy faces, over her parents standing proudly at her either side when she got her first placement at Fort Benning, over the beautiful shot of Niagara Falls that Helen managed to snag with their last bit of film. She sighs, and sits on her bed, and thinks maybe she has to start keeping a diary or all of her thoughts are going to come out in a horrible gurgling scream and she’ll be put in a straight-jacket and sent away to someplace nobody wants to go. 

Things quiet up for a minute after that. Pierce and McIntyre, the newest arrival, get on like a house on fire, and for the moment they’re keeping to themselves even though Burns has confided in her that he doesn’t think they like him very much. The fighting is very brutal. Every day she sees boys injured in new ways that she wouldn’t think possible if they weren’t splayed out in front of her beneath Pierce’s thin fingers, McIntyre’s steady hands, or Burns’ trembling ones. It’s not fun, exactly, but it is routine, and it’s what she’s been training for her whole life. She never saw the front in the second world war, and she knows her father would never forgive her if she didn’t see it here either.

Another week later she passes Pierce in the compound in the middle of the night. He actually gives her a polite smile and nod, like he’s so tired he’s forgotten he’s not just trawling the streets of Boston or wherever, and she doesn’t know why but she takes it as a personal affront.

“Aren’t you forgetting something, Captain?” she says. He turns around, brow furrowed and eyes only half open. He stands cockeyed, crooked, like always, his hip just waiting for a hand to be placed on it.

“Yes?”

“I _am_ your superior officer. You are supposed to salute.”

He laughs. He actually laughs. “Oh, come on, Major, you don’t actually expect us to go through all that every time we see you.”

“As a matter of fact, I do. This is an _army_ base, you are an _army_ officer, and it’s not merely my opinion that you should behave as such.”

“Oh,” he says, drawing it out into at least three syllables. “Is that so.”

He beyond aggravates her.

“I can’t believe you. You think it’s okay to treat me without a shred of respect and behave like an absolute anarchist because you’re just _that_ good?”

“No,” he says casually. “I’d think it was okay even if I weren’t that good. Except that I am.” He smiles, his eyes crinkle. “Goodnight, Margaret.”

He’s never called her by her first name before. Whatever she intended to do with that conversation, she seems to have done the exact opposite. He’s demoted her. And tomorrow, that’s how the whole camp will see her. In one moment, one misstep with one infuriating man, she has un-major-ed herself and been permanently damned to Margaret _-_ hood. She could tear her hair out, shave it all off.She wants to scream. She thinks she hates every man she has ever met, every man on earth. What right do they have to make it look so easy, to make her feel like nothing? She dreams that she’s Joan of Arc, and wakes up when the flames reach her face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> up next: why does margaret bother with frank, and maybe everybody can sit down and have a normal conversation and a nice moment or two... :)


	2. Frank and McIntyre

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> chapter 2 aka self-recognition through the hawkeye pierce

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning for moments of period- and hawkeye-typical stupidity and misogyny

Why does Margaret bother with Frank? Months into their tenure, it’s a question she finds herself asking every day, and every day struggling to come up with better answers than he’s easy, he’s desperate for her, he’s predictable, and he’s a good screw. Some days he really does seem so in love with her that he could be persuaded to leave his wife, and if he offered her a future back in the States it’s not like she’d turn him down… Still.

She always wanted to join the army, that’s why she did, but she spends her days surrounded by so many goddamn men that she thinks she’ll drown. She leaves a room seething from an argument with Pierce only to butt heads with the colonel only to trip over Radar only to have to soothe Frank’s ego. She would turn to her nurses but they never turn to her, and besides, Pierce and McIntyre have all but turned them against her for reasons she can’t understand unless it really is just that they find joy in her complete and total social isolation from anyone besides Frank Burns.

She has Frank come to her tent when they’re both on an hour off. Usually she doesn’t picture anyone else when she’s in bed with him, since she likes him enough, his patriotism and his utter devotion to her to find him sexy, but some days he doesn’t quite cut it. Some days she pictures General MacArthur, or Lyle Weisskopf, or really any generic G.I. with broad shoulders and dark hair on days when she’s finding Frank to be a little pathetic. Some days her mind wanders into picturing Marilyn Monroe or Alice Faye and when that happens she forces herself to open her eyes and watch Frank and be here, here, here.

Luckily, Frank’s good enough at this to keep her occupied even if sometimes he finishes too fast and she has to get herself off while he snivels an apology. Which is why she definitely hasn’t spent any time imagining what Pierce and/or McIntyre are like in bed. (Pierce is probably all right but she bets he talks too much.) (Pierce _definitely_ thinks making you laugh is tantamount to making you come.) (McIntyre… she’s too close to actually finding him attractive to let herself fantasize about him.) (It’s his hair, she thinks. Definitely the hair.)

“Oh, Margaret,” Frank moans. She’s very distracted today. She’s not picturing anybody in his place; she’s just replaying her conversations with Pierce and Blake from earlier and trying to figure out why everything here is so upside down. _Because it’s a war zone, Major, everything is upside down_ , she can practically hear Pierce saying, and the thought of him penetrating her inner monologue makes her want to puncture both her eardrums, as if that would help. Frank finishes and she fakes it so she can lie down and keep thinking.

“Was it as good for you as it was for me?” Frank says, nuzzling into her shoulder.

“Yes, darling.” She pets his hair.

“Oh, good.”

“God, what is it about them that makes them so, so… so uniquely infuriating?” she says, gesturing with her free hand.

“Who, darling?”

“Them!” she answers. “Blake! McIntyre! Pierce.”

“Oh, them,” Frank says. “I really don’t know what I did to make them hate me so much.”

Margaret sighs. “It’s your courage, Frank. Your dedication to the fight. They’re jealous.” She says it because it’s what she has to say. There was a time, maybe even a mere month ago, when she would have believed that, but nowadays her patience for Frank wears much thinner, even if she does love how much he _desires_ her. It is simply so, so much better than nothing.

“They don’t care what anybody thinks of them, Pierce especially,” Frank says, and he’s right about that. “They make it so that’s all I can think about, how my every move is a wrong one.”

“Oh, my darling. I’m so sorry,” Margaret says out of habit. “We’ll get them one day.”

“We will?”

“Sure. One day they’ll do something they can’t come back from.” 

When Margaret catches Pierce the next week whitewashing the side of her tent for some unknown reason, she can’t believe how soon that time has come. She startles him when she grabs him by the arm and hauls him away while he flails and splatters both of them with paint.

“I’m going to have you arrested,” she says through clenched teeth.

“You and whose army?” he says, but she thinks she sees something behind his eyes that betrays he knows how serious she is, this is. That if somebody really tried to have him done in, they would probably succeed and he could do hard time, and probably never practice medicine again. It’s another brand of completely infuriating when that thought is enough to make her want to drop charges she hasn’t even begun to press. She realizes she’s still gripping his arm and lets go.

“What is your problem, Captain?” He opens his mouth to talk back but she continues before he can say _the war_ like a goddamn broken record. “And why do you have to take it out on me?”

Everybody seems to think Pierce is the king of having a moral compass, but somehow he doesn’t draw the line at fucking with her. Yeah, he’d never hit a woman but apparently he’s not above psychologically debilitating one.

“You’re just asking for it, Major,” he says, and she could strangle him on the spot for being the latest in a long line of men to say that to her. “Always standing like that with your clusters out.”

“Okay, that’s it, Mister.” She snatches the paintbrush out of his hand and it gets both of their boots with white specks. “One more comment like that and you’ll be in front of a judge faster than you can say ‘Fort Leavenworth.’ There are regulations here for a reason, you know, so you can’t get away with treating me like a piece of meat!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, take it easy,” he says, holding his hands up. “It’s nothing personal, except for the fact that your job relies for its existence upon death, destruction, and the perpetual decimation of countries you probably couldn’t point to on a map. Other than that, I’ve got nothing against you. I certainly don’t fault you for being a woman, if that’s what you mean. In fact that probably makes the whole thing worse.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” She’s seething with so much rage at that comment that she doesn’t have time to take him up on his gross mischaracterization of her career path. Besides, she could point to Korea on a map since at least 1945.

“Well… would you give me that?” He takes the dripping paint brush from her and sets it and the tin on the ground. “It just means there’s no way you were drafted, and I don’t trust people who volunteer to be here. Of course, that means I can’t trust any of the women which is too bad because I’d really love to get to know some of you,” he says with far too much lust in his voice.

“Okay, okay, you can stop now,” she says. “But you should know you’re still being obnoxious, especially considering how much easier you have it than we do.”

He laughs, and it’s not sharp or biting like usual. He seems genuinely surprised.

“What?” he says.

Men. For all he thinks of himself as a nice guy, Pierce does not have an ounce of compassion for her.

“It’s not easy to be a woman here, you know,” she explains. “You men are the ones the world was built for. I suppose… I suppose I’m sorry they had to make you come here, but it was either you or somebody else.”

His expression darkens. Whatever playfulness had been there before is gone in a second.

“Not if there’s peace,” he says. He sighs, and rolls his eyes. “Besides, I’m not saying I think it’s easy to be a woman here, or anywhere really, although… I mean, if you think it’s particularly bad it’s your own fault for being here–”

“Pierce!”

“I’m just saying, I– you know what, never mind. This place goes against everything I stand for. What can I say, I’m a pacifist in a war zone. Strike that, I’m anyone in a war zone.”

“You know this isn’t actually Hell, right?” It absolutely boils her blood how he insists upon insulting her life choices at every available moment as if just because she’s military she isn’t going to be hurt.

“Could’ve fooled me,” he says. He looks down, and kicks up some dirt. “So why do they say that, you know?”

She meets his eyes when he looks back up and stares at him until she has to blink. Then she bends down as if to pick up the whitewash, but thinks _screw it_.

“Come on,” she says. “Let’s get a drink.” She doesn’t want to be his friend, but by God she wants to understand him. Then maybe she’ll be able to get him to listen to her. Besides, for some reason even though they’ve been yelling at each other, her brain isn’t actually aflame with hatred anymore.

“What? I thought you were having me court-martialed.”

“Maybe next week. Come on.”

She all but drags him to the Officers Club. There’s something about the way they fight, the way the only silences left are deliberate that’s almost exhilarating. She wonders if he doesn’t mind it as much as she doesn’t. She orders martinis for them both, prompting Pierce to sharply raise his eyebrows but keep his mouth remarkably shut. 

They each have an entire drink in one of those deliberate silences.

“You’re just so naive,” she says as he bites his second olive with his back teeth.

“Huh?”

“For thinking everything would just be fine if we declared peace tomorrow.”

He stares at her while he chews. “You really think I’m that stupid? It’s just the obvious and very necessary first step.” He takes a sip. “You’re naive for thinking this is okay in the first place.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, everyone likes you, Captain, what do you have to complain about?” God, she hadn’t even thought that’s what was on her mind, but something about being around simply Pierce compels you to say what’s really bothering you. It’s almost like he’s easy to talk to.

“Margaret!” he laughs. Bitter, condescending, infectious. “Why are you acting like this is high school?”

“ _I’m_ acting like this is high school? That’s rich, coming from the most juvenile person I’ve ever met. What do you mean, I’m acting like this is high school?”

“You just said I have nothing to complain about because everybody likes me! This is a war, not a popularity contest, although believe you me, I wish it was. Or I should, apparently.”

“But I just–! I don’t understand how you’re so– when you can get away with anything you want. You’re so… free!”

“Free? Margaret! I couldn’t be less free if I tried. I haveto be here, or else, remember? You can walk out anytime you want! Me, I’m stuck here, stuck in everybody’s worst nightmare until the powers that goddamn be deign to tell me I can go home, except I can’t even go _home_ home since I was stupid enough to live alone so I don’t even have my apartment anymore–”

“Okay!” She cuts him off. Okay. So she hadn’t really thought about it that way.

It’s odd that he can feel so trapped when he acts so free, never obeying anybody’s rules but his own. She supposes he has to, since he can’t get away with the big one, which is going home. Although, plenty of people get by without rebelling every second. She’s still not sure what makes him so special (but it must be something).

She sips her drink. It’s weird. They’re arguing, but… they’re talking. She feels as if she’s come to know him more in the last five minutes than in the past six months and already she hates him less. She still doesn’t trust him, but she’s starting, _starting,_ to see his side of things.

“It’s just that you seem to be handling it so well,” she says.

“Handling it well?” He laughs. He always laughs at her. “Major, I’m seconds away from complete mental collapse at all times!” He says that, though obviously he’s not. “You think just because I’m not twitching and screaming and running around naked that I’m fine? Jesus, sister, you got a lot to learn about the human condition.”

She scoffs. “Well, then why don’t you get some help? Why don’t _you_ put in for a psycho?” Lord knows he’d get one. She feels strange thinking that not thirty seconds ago she was accusing him of handling things well. She realizes she’s not actually sure what she thinks is going on his head, but at times he certainly _acts_ crazy enough.

“Because I’m not actually insane,” he answers her.

“Oh, no?”

“Ha!” he spits bitterly. “Everybody sure thinks I am. And maybe it makes me feel that way when I seem to be the only person within a hundred miles from here who thinks this whole thing is fucked.”

“Captain,” she says. “Wars have been fought for thousands of years.”

“Yeah. And they were fucked all those other times, too.”

At least he’s consistent.

“Well, do you have to give me such a hard time about it?” she says. “I’m just here to do my job, same as you are.”

“Same as I am? Are you kidding me? Still, with this?”

“You’re a doctor, I’m a nurse! Can’t you see we have something in common there?”

“Something, sure, but it’s not enough. I just think we’re not destined to be chums, Dr. Jekyll and uh, and Little Annie Oak-leaves, you know?”

She looks at him. His eyes are kind of… soft. They’re blue, but never icy. She used to think he always looked bored, or disinterested, or maybe just in a constant state of disbelief, but now she thinks he looks sad. _Poor Hawkeye_ , she’d said sarcastically when Captain Sherman was trying to put him away in Tokyo. _Poor, sick Hawkeye_. He looks like he could use a hug.

“Maybe not,” she says. “But maybe we can learn to play nice.”

He considers the proposal over his martini glass.

“Why’d you bring me in here in the first place? Just trying to get me drunk?” He waggles his eyebrows. She glares at him. Leave it to him to ruin what she thought might be a genuinely tender moment.

“I wish I knew,” she says. “I– I wish I knew.”

One day things are going completely out of control in the O.R. They’ve each lost at least one patient so far. Pierce has lost three and she’s never seen him like this before. He’s working better than he ever has, absolutely on top of his everything and boys keep dying on him. What do they expect if they always give him the ones in the worst shape? Margaret’s at McIntyre’s table now and even he’s focusing too hard to be obnoxious. He doesn’t even have the extra headspace to try and distract Pierce.

“Shit, shit, shit! No, no, no, no, no! Fuck! God-fucking-damn it! Clamp! Clamp! Shit! Fuck! Jesus-fucking–” Margaret looks up and sees Pierce splattered with blood where before there’d only been a small stain.

“We’re losing him, Doctor,” Kellye says from the anesthesia machine.

“Yeah, somehow I’d figured that out considering I’m now wearing most of his insides on my outsides.” He’s in the boy’s stomach practically up to his elbows.

“Eighty over fifty, Doctor.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Seventy over forty.”

“Would you shut the hell up?”

“Sixty systolic.”

“I didn’t hear that.”

“I’m not getting anything. He’s gone, Doctor.”

“Shit!” Pierce yells with his hands still inside the kid. “Jesus-fucking-Christ!” He finally stands and lets them start preparing the body to be moved. He kicks the table. “Shit!”

“Pierce!” Frank pipes up. Even Margaret really wishes he wouldn’t. “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

“Go fuck yourself, Frank!” Pierce practically screams. The room is silent except for the clattering of whatever frantic operation Blake is performing. Nobody’s brought Pierce another case so he kicks the table again and storms out.

Nobody knows where to look. McIntyre desperately makes eye contact with Blake, who appears to be hyperventilating and nearly drops his instrument.

“Somebody’s gotta go after him!” McIntyre says. “Henry!”

“Well, can you go, McIntyre?” Blake says. Margaret rolls her eyes. Obviously McIntyre can’t go, what does Blake think this is, all for show?

“No, this kid needs me. Come on, Henry, somebody’s gotta help him.”

“Kellye, take over for me here,” Margaret hears herself saying. “I’ll go.” She doesn’t wait for Blake’s permission and she doesn’t miss the look of surprise on what she can see of McIntyre’s face either.

She follows the trail of blood and gloves and surgical get-up all around the outside of the building till she finds him on the floor of Radar’s office sitting against one of the legs of the bed with his head in his hands.

“Pierce,” she tries to say gently. He looks up startled. He’s been crying, which shouldn’t surprise her, but it does. Christ, but he’s such a girl, she thinks, like that’s a bad thing.

“Why’d they send you?” he says. “Afraid me and Trapper would run off together?”

“McIntyre’s wrist deep in a pretty nasty chest,” she says. “But he yelled until someone came to check on you.”

“Uh-huh,” Pierce says. He sniffles. “What’s gotten into me, Margaret, huh? I don’t walk out of O.R.”

“No,” she agrees. “You don’t.”

He stares up at her, she stares down at him.

“Everybody has bad days, Captain,” she says. He opens his mouth to talk but she cuts him off. “And if you say ‘not me’ I’ll kill you myself.”

“No,” he says, and she’s gotten a small laugh out of him as well. “I was gonna say but do they usually have a hundred bad days in a row? ‘Cause I think that’s what my count’s at.”

Margaret sighs. She can’t tell if he’s right or if he’s pathetic or both. She sits down next to him but doesn’t touch him in any way. Their knees don’t even graze. He wipes his eyes with his palms.

“You don’t have to be perfect, you know,” she says. He groans, his face still behind his hands.

“I’m not trying to be _perfect_ , Margaret, I’m trying to be good.”

“Pierce–”

“I just lost four patients in as many hours, I– what are they trying to do to me here, huh? To them, to all of us? What’s the point, just to see us squirm? Well, here I am, I’m squirming. I’m calling uncle, I’m surrendering, I’m giving in. They win, okay, you win. Can I go home now?”

“No,” she says. Sometimes he worries her, but she’s an army nurse. She’s dealt with outbursts like this before.

“Break it to me gently, why don’t you.”

“We need you in there.”

“Why? You saw me, I’m completely useless.”

“Pierce, you jackass! You haven’t screwed up a single thing all day! Those boys were dead before they got put on your table, you were just– just a Hail Mary, you know?”

“Then that’s not fair!” he yells, and pushes himself up. “Give me somebody I can help, Goddamnit!” His voice is breaking and there are tears in his eyes again. Margaret wishes desperately McIntyre had been able to come instead of her. She tries to imagine what he would do.

“Hey,” she says softly. She stands in front of him and sort of flails her arms for a minute before they cooperate with her mind and she takes him by the shoulders. “Hawkeye.” A ridiculous name for a ridiculous man, but it’s his.

Margaret understands and doesn’t understand at the same time why this is hitting him so hard. He’s a surgeon (certified in chest and general, he’s quick to remind anyone who even hints that they’ve forgotten); there’s no way he hasn’t seen his share of deaths on his table before, maybe even this many in a row. Then again, even she has to admit these are extreme circumstances, especially for someone so thoroughly civilian as Hawkeye Pierce. She gives his shoulders a squeeze. He rolls his eyes.

“I’m going to hug you now,” she says.

“What?”

“I’m going to hug you now. If that’s all right.”

“I, um–” She can practically hear the record scratch sound playing in his brain, the way behavior that is at all sensitive or caring is so completely discordant with his idea of her that he can hardly process it. “Sure, I guess so.”

“Okay.” So she hugs him. His ribs poke her chest and his arms are warm around her and he smells a little like Frank since presumably he’s been stealing his soap and a little like something she doesn’t recognize because she’s never been this close to him before. It’s not so bad. He smells kind of like home, or the idea of home, anyway. He gives a good hug, the kind that makes her think he’d be a good friend if he didn’t spend every waking second trying to undermine her and sabotage everything she’s built here. But aside from that.

“Back to the O.R., huh?” he says. 

“Yes, Doctor,” she says into his chest. She feels him sigh, and he removes himself from her arms.

“Thanks, Major,” he says, sounding pretty sincere. “That was– that was actually halfway decent of you. And don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone what we did.”

Then he has the audacity to wink at her, and walk away like he wasn’t breaking down crying seconds earlier. He’s definitely lying, anyway. He’ll spill everything to McIntyre later and soon her last line of defense, the tough image she’s built up, will be gone, too. She waits two minutes and only goes in after she knows he’ll be scrubbed already.

O.R. doesn’t actually go on much longer. Pierce takes a superficial laceration with little to no fuss and Margaret assists Blake with the back half of a bowel resection and then they clean up. Afterward she takes Frank back to her tent with her and watches McIntyre take Pierce back to theirs with his arm around him and his nose practically in his hair and her mind is empty, completely blank. Frank’s hand is sliding down her back while at the same time he’s complaining about Pierce’s display of dramatics earlier.

“Oh, Frank,” Margaret says, half exhilarated, half annoyed as she opens her tent door. “He’s just trying his best. We all get overwhelmed at times, don’t we?”

Frank suddenly stops his frenetic groping. “What’s gotten into you? Since when do you defend Pierce?”

“I don’t know, Frank. We’re all just people, aren’t we? Life is hard. Now would you please fuck me for one minute so I can forget about death for a while?”

He acts shocked for a second at her use of profanity and she’s not sure who’s benefit it’s supposed to be for. Then he obliges because he’s Frank. Then he falls asleep next to her and whimpers for his mother while he dreams.

Frank’s father is dead, and his mother coddles him. Pierce’s father loves him, and Margaret thinks his mother is out of the picture. McIntyre is well enough adjusted that she knows next to nothing about his parents. Margaret’s mother drinks, and her father is a Colonel, and that’s about all you need to know.

She has to wake Pierce up one time at three in the morning for hospital duty. Radar’s on R&R and Klinger messed up the schedule and so now she has to go and get Pierce. Her instinct is to be harsh but she reminds herself that he hasn’t actually done anything wrong; he’s just been sleeping while she’s been awake.

“Captain.” She taps his shoulder. He shifts but doesn’t wake up.

“Captain,” she says again, a little louder. Nothing. She takes a deep breath.

“Hawkeye.” He stirs. His eyebrows raise while his eyes are still closed. She jostles him by the arm again and he finally sits up, running a hand through his hair that’s gone wild with sleep.

“Hmmph,” he says, and rubs at his eyes.

“Come on, Captain.” She’s attempting gentleness again. “Let’s go.”

He nods. Strange to see him follow orders without an argument. He swivels and plants his feet on the floor, then puts his hands back over his eyes as he keeps waking up.

“Since I got here I have the craziest dreams,” he mumbles. “Dreams about… things I haven’t thought about in years. Dreams that I’m a kid, dreams about my mom.” He looks up at her. “I guess… I guess this place doesn’t mess with your head like that.”

She’s not sure what to say so she just stays silently standing there, her mouth slightly more open than is dignified.

“Okay, let’s go,” he says, slipping into his robe and boots. He follows her out. This place messes with her head plenty.

With the flu epidemic over, post-op rounds mostly means checking on Pierce. That’s certainly how McIntyre sees it. She sees him from the doorway, sitting at the side of Pierce’s bed reading a magazine out loud while the two of them try to stifle their laughter to keep from waking any of the other patients. She lingers and watches them, since only a handful of other beds are full and Pierce does appear to be the only one currently conscious.

After a minute McIntyre sighs and puts down the magazine, and takes Pierce’s temperature. While he waits for the reading to come in he… plays with Pierce’s hair? And runs a hand down his scruffy cheek before taking back the thermometer. It almost looks like they’re flirting, but Margaret eschews the thought, though not before finding herself wishing whatever she and Frank had was more like that. Whatever Pierce and McIntyre have looks very loving at times.

Even though they seem to live to make her miserable, they have so much fun. She and Frank really only have one type of fun, and while she appreciates his dedication to the cause of spreading freedom she’s not entirely sure that she likes the rest of his personality. Pierce and McIntyre complete each other’s sentences, they’re always on the same page and sometimes she and Frank are like that and then sometimes he’s so totally off the mark that she doesn’t even think they’re reading the same book. 

Then McIntyre leans down and kisses Pierce on the forehead. Then Pierce grabs the collar of McIntyre’s t-shirt and starts pulling him toward him. Then McIntyre takes a furtive look around and Margaret ducks behind the window out of reflex and when she looks back McIntyre is kissing him on the lips, like, actually kissing him. And Pierce is kissing back in such a way that indicates this is definitely not the first time they’ve done this.

Her first thought is to rush in and stop them because Pierce might still be contagious and McIntyre’s only just recovered from the flu himself and her second thought is why the hell was that her first thought? She hides behind the door because of some kind of instinct to protect their privacy and only glances through the window again to make sure she wasn’t imagining things.

 _Well_ , she thinks. Now she really does have it, the piece of ammunition that could get them both out of her hair for good. But she doesn’t have time to decide whether or not to ruin their careers, she has rounds! She picks up an empty tray that someone left lying around and drops it on the ground, hoping the clattering sound will be enough to indicate to them that someone’s coming.

When she finally enters post-op McIntyre has catapulted himself to the foot of the bed with his magazine while Pierce pretends to be asleep and she breathes a small sigh of relief. Does that mean she didn’t want to turn them in in the first place? She remembers Lorraine’s hand on her thigh, gripping for dear life as she winced from the hydrogen peroxide Margaret was dabbing in her infected earlobe. She remembers noticing how close their faces were when she was done cleaning it, how she was sure she’d taste Lorraine’s breath if she exhaled. She remembers and she thinks nothing of it.

“McIntyre,” she says sharply, but not loud enough to “wake” Pierce.

“Oh, Major, good of you to stop by. Excuse the missus,” he indicates Pierce. “She needs her beauty sleep.”

Margaret rolls her eyes out of habit while thinking of all the other times they’ve make jokes like that. “I’m sure.” She grabs Pierce’s chart and looks at it without reading it. McIntyre stands.

“All right, I’m going for a cup of coffee.” He points at her. “You lay one finger on him, missy, and I’m gonna have to take you out.”

Pierce struggles to keep his giggling in check.

“Sounds about right,” she says, and watches McIntyre leave. “I know you’re awake.” Pierce’s eyes snap open in her periphery.

“How could you tell?”

“I’m psychic.” She takes a seat on the stool next to his bed. “How are you feeling?”

“If you’re psychic how come you need me to tell you?” He smiles and she almost doesn’t find it annoying. He’s still ribbing her just like he said he would but she swears there’s less heat to it, less hate. “My fever’s gone,” he answers her. “I’d say I’ll be back on my feet in a day or two.”

“Oh, that’s good,” she says. “It’s awfully quiet without you around.”

His eyebrows quirk up and down in a flash, and he props himself up in bed. “Knew you’d miss me.”

“I wouldn’t miss you for fifty dollars.”

He laughs. “Margaret! Since when are you funny?”

 _Since always. Since I was a kid. Since Lorraine burst out laughing at something I said about our fathers behind their backs and I couldn’t sleep till I heard that sound again_.

“Since somebody had to be, since you were out of commission.”

“Gee whiz, Major, that might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

It’s easy not to mind his unprofessionalism when he’s laid up in bed. She has the feeling she’ll be back to finding him insufferable once he’s back to having reasons to hate her which mostly consists of seeing her give and take orders. But for now… he really isn’t bothering her. She doesn’t know what that means when everything they stand for is still so diametrically opposed, and it’s not as if she exactly wants to be his friend. Still, it does feel kind of good when Pierce– when Hawkeye likes you. He’s fun, like Margaret used to be. She guesses he’s a lot of things like she used to be.

“Can I ask you something?” she says.

“Sure.”

“How do you do it? Not why, how. How do you have the energy for– for the constant back-talk, for the fits of hysterics, for messing with Frank and I so much?”

It’s that question that she needs the answer to, since she thinks she hates him more for how he confuses her than for anything in particular that he’s done. She hates not understanding things, him, when for so long the world was straightforward and things were like how she was taught they’d be and everything was black and white. She even hates how much he’d love that metaphor, to know he’s the one bringing color into her life.

“How?” he repeats, mulling it over. “I don’t know. I have to or I’ll go crazy, so of course I can do it. Besides, I like messing with you, Margaret. You take everything so fucking seriously.”

She knows she does, but only because she has to. Because if she didn’t no one would take her seriously in return.

“Well,” she says. “Thanks for answering me, anyway.”

“Anytime. Not thinking of going into business for yourself, are you? Branching out into a few of the ol’ fits of hysterics? Huh? Huh?”

“Not on your life, Pierce,” she says, holding back a smile. She’s not sure she sees what everybody else sees in him, but she sees something. She sees something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so part of me is like timeline-schmimeline and part of me is like hawkmarg having a nice moment before carry on hawkeye and Margaret knowing about piercintyre before “George” but deciding not to do anything about it adds layers and part of me is like no it doesn’t and it makes no sense and part of me is like I just genuinely have worms in my brain from hit 70s dramedy mash and so do we all so it’s probably fine. so. yeah. 
> 
> Also, like, the visceral pain I’m going through writing Margaret’s pro-army internal monologue… just please I’m begging you not to think I agree with her
> 
> also.. sorry that this does not have a plot, i am simply writing moments i would have liked to see and if other people like it then i am thrilled beyond belief!
> 
> Up next: bj is here :)


	3. Hunnicutt and Potter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> chapter 3 aka it's nice to be nice to the nice

Most days, Margaret likes BJ. He’s nothing like she and Frank had hoped in that he’s not gung-ho or particularly red-blooded, but he has a certain calmness that makes it possible he’s exactly what the camp needs. He’s so… normal. Even though he and Pierce get along, he’s still like a breath of fresh air, and he brings an air of civility to the place that’s been severely lacking. He might even be a good influence.

Pierce is still reckless, still angry, still cynical, but Hunnicutt is so kind he seems to make Pierce want to be kind in return. If Trapper John McIntyre was Lorraine Anderson, then BJ Hunnicutt is Helen Whitfield. It makes Margaret wonder what’s going on under the surface that he hides so well. He comes to her tent one day to casually ask if he should be worried about Hawkeye and she laughs and tells him _Oh, Captain. Everybody’s worried about Pierce_. The look he gives her makes her wonder why she’s laughing.

“You– you ain’t seen nothing yet, Captain,” she tells him. _One time he didn’t sleep for a week and he tried to tow the latrine to North Korea. One time he told a shrink he was in love with Frank Burns to convince him he was crazy. One time he got barbecue spare ribs flown in from Chicago just because he was having a craving._ The list goes on but she’s not sure what to say to Hunnicutt because for Pierce’s sake she doesn’t want to scare him away. She knows what it’s like when someone you’d like to be friends with hears about all your crazy from someone else and decides not to bother. Margaret’s not like Frank; even for all the grief he gives her she’d rather Pierce have Hunnicutt than be alone.

“That’s not exactly encouraging,” Hunnicutt says through his permanent banal smile. Margaret shrugs.

“So he’s a little… eccentric. I’m sure you’ll learn to love him.”

“I’m sure I will.”

After that she goes wildly back and forth between thinking she loves them and thinking she hates them, Pierce and Hunnicutt, that is. Between thinking they’re wonderful and thinking they’re horrible, they’re honorable or they’re scoundrels.

Things used to make more sense. Things used to add up, and they just don’t anymore. Hawkeye says the world is built on contradictions. Marx says that, too. Margaret read him in college when she used to be friends with communists, before the very thought made her toes curl. She and Pierce are leaned up against the wall of post-op while Radar manages to doze in a corner, the rest of camp having bugged out.

“Who knows if this place will still be here tomorrow?” she says. “All that is solid melts into air.”

Pierce processes what she just said slowly turns his head to look at her, halfway between perplexed and impressed.

“That’s–” he starts. “Do I have to tell you what you just quoted from or would you rather I alert the M.P.s straight away instead?”

“Pierce.” She rolls her eyes. “It’s not a crime to have read it.”

“Are you sure? Because I have friends that have been arrested for less.”

It’s not a crime to have read the _Communist Manifesto_ , though it is to agree with it. Pierce turns her into a regular beatnik sometimes. It makes her skin crawl, but she also doesn’t want this conversation to end.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she says. He snorts a laugh. A shell explodes in the distance and out of instinct or panic or whatever she falls into his arms.

“Oh,” he says, a lusty lilt to his voice. “Hello.”

“Shut up.” She extricates herself and dusts off her clothes. “You don’t actually have to turn every conversation into an avenue for flirtation.”

“I guess not,” he says. “but it helps to pass the time.”

She eyes him up and down as he stretches his back against the wall. He’s going to have a hunch by the time he’s forty-five. She does find it thoroughly obnoxious when he flirts with her, simply because she isn’t looking around, thank you very much. She has Frank for her… _needs_ , and she’s only interested in flirting if it’s with someone who intends to follow through, honest-woman-wise. The thing about Pierce is that sometimes she’s not even sure he intends to follow through _needs_ -wise, since he doesn’t just flirt with her; quite frankly he appears to flirt with anything that moves. Either it’s a joke with everybody, or it’s serious with everybody, and if she knows Pierce then it’s a joke. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t wish he would knock it off sometimes. 

She’s about to tell him something like that when another shell goes off, and this time they sort of end up in each others’ arms, each with one around the other's shoulder.

“Fancy meeting you here,” he says through a grimace.

“You are absolutely no comfort,” she says. He laughs, one sharp, loud sound. “And your shoulders are too bony.”

“Pardon my build.”

They sit up, and she takes her arm back from around him. He keeps his around her, though, and gives her a look as if to ask _is this okay?_ She reminds herself how he always says he’s scared even if he doesn’t show it, and answers him by laying her head on his shoulder and letting herself exhale. She feels him do the same.

“Do you remember when– I’d only been here a few months, I can’t imagine you’d been here much longer,” he says, “when we got hit, and we got stuck in the O.R. together?”

“Yes,” she says, because she does, because if she tries she can still see his eyes, bright and terrified, as he gripped her arm and told her she was okay and waited anxiously to hear it back.

“It was like New York in the rain, under the table with you.” And he’s back to talking nonsense again.

“What?”

“That, that, that interviewer guy, from the news, he asked me, you know, what’s it like to be in a war. And I said it’s like New York in the rain.”

She lifts her head to look at him. “I’ve never been to New York.”

“Yeah. Well… relax, put your head back, close your eyes, it’s okay.” She does. She listens more to the sound of his voice than the words he’s saying as he talks. He says something about huddling under awnings with strangers, how you all buddy up just by virtue of being stuck there together. She guesses he means that’s what life on this camp is like. And he says the difference here is they’re all trying to kill everybody who’s crowding in the bodega across the street just because they happened to be coming from uptown.

“Except,” he says, “when we were trapped together. That was like the first time I ever felt buddied up with you, and even then it didn’t really feel like that. So often I feel like we’re on opposite sides of this thing.”

“How could we be on opposite sides? We’re Americans, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, I guess so, I mean…” he fidgets with the fabric of her sleeve. “Sometimes I don’t think the sides are really North and South, or us and the communists or whatever. I think the sides are people who want the war to end and people who don’t.”

Margaret slightly feels like she’s been punched in the stomach. She draws her knees up to her chest and inches closer into Pierce’s side. He’s only shaking a little bit.

“I want the war to end,” she says too quietly.

“What?”

“I want the war to end,” she repeats, looking at him this time. She can’t read his expression. “I didn’t always,” she admits. “I thought… it was glamorous, it made me feel noble. It gave me Frank and I wanted to keep him. I don’t– trust me, Pierce, I want the war to end just as much as you do.”

“I–” he cuts himself off. “Whatever you say, Margaret.”

“You want me to take it back?” she says. He rolls his eyes. She continues in a mocking tone but wearing a smile she knows he’ll appreciate. “Say nobody wants it to end as much as you do? That you’re the most miserable, the most long-suffering, the bravest little solider on this–”

“Okay, okay! You can cut it out, now,” he says, smiling in disbelief. That’s right, she can play by his rules when she wants to. Now if only he could play by hers sometimes.

More explosions. Miraculously, Radar is still asleep, so Pierce refrains from screaming at the powers that be to leave them alone. Margaret takes a deep breath with her eyes closed and tries to center herself.

“God, but it is too bad about the Officers Club, isn’t it?” she says. “I wish we could put on a record to cover up all this noise.”

Pierce’s eyes light up. “Record, schmecord!” he says. “Who needs records when you have Benjamin Franklin Pierce, Spoons and Mouth Trumpet Champion of Southern Maine three years running?”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” _Mouth trumpet._

“Exactly what it says on the tin,” he says, grinning. He stands and holds his hand out to her. “Madame, may I have the pleasure of this dance?” It’s not particularly flirty or sultry at all. He’s so high energy all of a sudden, talking to her like she’s BJ.

“Pierce, you are on another level,” she says as she lets him hoist her up.

“The view’s better from up here.” He hesitates before placing his hand on her waist. “I know I’m only a captain, but is it all right if I lead?”

“Just get on with it!” she says, grabbing his hand and putting it where she feels comfortable. She puts her other on his shoulder and they both note the fact that they’re standing awkwardly far apart.

“I didn’t realize your belly button was the south pole of a magnet,” Pierce says.

“Just don’t–” she says. “Just don’t get the wrong idea.” She takes a step closer to him. His shoulders are visibly tense. She figures hers are, too.

“Of course, Margaret, I wouldn’t dream of it. But if my father catches us like this we’ll have to get married.”

She looks up at him. “I’m serious.”

“Okay, okay, come here.” He takes another half step closer and slides his hand over to her back and starts dancing, leading them in a slow meandering step around the room. He purses his lips and makes noises like a bugle, the recognizable opening notes of “You’re the Top.”

She can’t help from smiling, and she feels her tight muscles relaxing. Maybe Pierce isn’t harmless, not like Hunnicutt, for example, but he can be good fun when he wants to be. He’s silly. This is a harsh place for a person like that. Even as she’s enjoying moving with him to the soft music he’s making she thinks maybe they’d all be happier if he’d never been sent here in the first place.

After a while his shoulders finally unclench, too, and he sighs.

“I think I’m infatuated with you,” he says softly. “You remind me of Franklin Roosevelt.”

She rolls her eyes and laughs. A common combination of reactions to Hawkeye.

“You always say the most ridiculous things.”

“Well, what’s ridiculous about that? I think Roosevelt was dignified. He stood up for what he believed in, he didn’t back down even in the face of whatever he was in the face of.”

“Hm,” she says. “You make a pass at Roosevelt?”

“Is this a pass?”

“Just go back to your Cole Porter, choir boy,” she says, and leans her head against his chest. He pulls her closer into a hug as they sway there. She closes her eyes and imagines he has, too. She wonders if he’s picturing being someplace else, anyplace else, or if maybe he’s like her. If maybe he can’t resort to fantasies to cover up the reality, not really, because the truth is too sharp, always poking you in the back just between your kidneys and reminding you where you are.

They get tired and fall asleep against the wall like they were before they started talking, and as soon as they open their eyes in the morning they don’t even look at each other; they both rush immediately to their patient’s bed and check on his peripheral nerve function. That’s what makes them able to tolerate each other after all; they’re both so stupid good at their jobs.

The letters come from her parents unexpectedly. Unexpected also because she rarely gets one from both of them on the same day, it’s just too unlikely a coincidence. She tears open her father’s first because she figures it’s what he’d expect. The key words jump out at her like they’re written in bright red and she has to sit down.

 _Separating. Divorce. Finalized. Mother. Away._ She holds a pillow over her face and screams for three seconds exactly before taking a sharp breath and pulling herself together. She’d thought her parents had the perfect marriage. Sure, they fought and Mother drank and they would go months without speaking but that’s what everyone’s parents are like, right? Right?

But lots of people get divorced. Lots of people’s parents get divorced. This doesn’t make her special, and it certainly isn’t going to ruin her day. There’s a knock at her door.

“What!” she hears herself yell a little too harshly.

“It’s Hawkeye.”

“Go away!”

A pause. “It’s just for your check-up.” What, no jokes? No side-splitting insults to hurl back and forth? “You said I should come at two.” That’s right, she did. She checks her hair in the mirror and hopes he doesn’t notice how red her eyes are, and if he does that he’s smart enough not to say anything. 

“Hey,” Pierce says after she lets him him in. He’s still writing on his clipboard as he crosses the threshold. He looks up. “Is that new?” He indicates her floral robe.

“Oh, this? Why, yes, it is.”

“It’s nice,” he says with a kind, small smile. “Suits you. Is it comfortable?”

“Hm? Thank you, Captain. Yes, it is quite.”

“Well, that’s good. I wouldn’t wanna see this war make anyone uncomfortable.”

“Don’t you ever give it a rest?”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Okay, let’s start with the temperature.”

Something must be on his mind because he doesn’t make a pass at her once, not a real one anyway. He’s the picture of professionalism- more than that, he’s warm and touches her delicately, and asks if things are okay before he does them. It’s the absolute bare minimum of decency but compared to the way people usually treat her it’s so fucking nice that she thinks she might cry.

“Hey,” he says, sounding hesitant. “Are you… okay?”

“What? Of course I am.”

“I just mean– don’t take this the wrong way or anything, you just seem a little… edgy? Uh, more than usual, I mean.”

“Pierce! How else am I supposed to take that?”

“I don’t know! I’m just–” he sighs. “Just let me know if there’s anything I can do, okay? I wouldn’t want your blood pressure reading to be artificially inflated if I can help it, you know?”

She has to remind herself that he’s probably not actually trying to be annoying. He’s actually a nice person, she knows that, she’s seen him be nice before. He just doesn’t usually go out of his way to be nice to her, not like this, not like it’s normal. Usually it takes all but complete disaster to squeeze a drop of kindness toward her out of him and even then she doesn’t trust him to keep things on the up and up. She eyes him suspiciously.

“I don’t trust you when you’re nice,” she says.

“What?” he laughs. “I’m always nice.”

“I know.”

“Uh-huh. So, what, you don’t ever trust me?”

“I just mean I know you can be nice, but I know you hate me. So I’ve got to be a little apprehensive when you’re nice to me, don’t you think?”

“Hate you?” He looks genuinely surprised. “I don’t hate you. You hate me.”

“Oh. I–” her instinct is to correct him, but she knows he’s at least a little bit right. “I certainly used to,” she says. “I don’t– maybe I don’t anymore.”

He raises his eyebrows. “High praise.”

“Well.”

“So…?” he says. He’s still standing a gentlemanly distance away from her but he looks eager to pull up a chair and have a gab session, like that’s something they do.

“What?”

He smiles coyly. “Come on, Margaret, whaddaya say? Don’t you wanna tell Aunt Hawkeye what’s bothering you?”

She wishes her gaze would turn him to stone.

“Maniac.”

“Thank you.” He grins the way he always does when people call him a maniac, so wide his eyes are practically closed. “Seriously, though. You’ll feel better if you talk about it.”

“I don’t need to feel better.”

“I’m overwhelmed by the health of your attitude.”

“What does it matter to you, anyway, how I’m doing?”

“I don’t know, it matters to me! Does it matter why?”

“I–” All of a sudden she chokes out a sob that she absolutely doesn’t mean to. Something about the unconditional way he wants people to feel better, something about how he cares without trying to, something about how it matters more to him if she’s doing okay than it does to her stupid parents draws it out of her.

“Hey,” he says, and gingerly walks toward her. He places one hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not!” she protests.

“Okay, so it’s not.” She can hear his smile.

“It’s my parents,” she says, crying for real now. What the hell? Crying? With a man in her tent? With _Pierce_ in her tent? “They’re getting divorced.”

“Jesus,” he says, wrapping her in a hug. “I’m so sorry.”

She cries into his arms for a few minutes and thinks maybe it’s the longest she’s ever seen him go without talking. Every time she thinks she’s finished she pictures her mother sitting alone in some apartment somewhere, her father falling down a flight of stairs and having no one to help him, the two of them in a room bitterly signing papers and she breaks down again. Pierce still doesn’t say anything, he just gently strokes the back of her head and lets her cry. This is so goddamn undignified.

“What?” she says, after finally looking up at him. His eyes are surprisingly sad. “Nothing to add? No ribbing, no comeback?”

“What– why would I be horrible about that?.

“I– Oh.” She has to think for a second. “I guess I do think you’re a little heartless.” She takes a seat on her bed. “Callous.” He leans up against her desk and crosses his arms.

“People always tell me that and then conveniently forget all the times they’ve seen me break down crying or completely lose my shit over a total stranger’s wounds,” he says casually.

She feels her eyes grow wide as she considers that. Another obnoxious way he really is just like her, putting up a harsh veneer because deep down he’s sensitive. His just cracks more easily than hers does.

“I don’t want to talk about it, not with you,” she says, preempting the argument. “Distract me,” she says instead. “What’s bothering you, huh? That’s right, I noticed you were off when you got here.”

“Off? Who’s off? I’m not off. Or if I am I’ve been off for the past eighteen months straight.”

“That, I’d believe,” she mutters.

“Oh, what was that? Sorry, I couldn’t hear you over the sound of my ego shattering.” 

“Just shut up and talk to me.” And yes, she hears how silly that sounds.

“Oh, you know, just–” he waves his arms as he starts to pace around her tent, “worried that I’ll never find love. And that even if I did, I’m worried two people can’t actually make each other happy forever. Just standard stuff, you know how it is. Well, not anymore you don’t, of course, after all you are an engaged person.”

“Right,” she says with less conviction than she intended. She knows she told him to talk but she also can’t believe he’d say _that_ when she just told him her parents are splitting up. “What the hell brought this on?”

“Hm? Oh, nothing in particular. Just, ah– well, I can’t really tell you. As in I mean it’s not really my place to tell. It’s not– it’s not really my problem that’s bothering me, it’s–”

“BJ?”

“What? How did you–”

“Well, who else could it be about? You practically haven’t left his side since he got here.”

The tip of Pierce’s nose goes red. “Well– I–”

“It’s all right,” Margaret says. “If BJ wants to talk to me he will.”

Pierce raises his eyebrows in skepticism.

“I didn’t say I thought he would,” she says.

“Sure.”

“You are so funny.”

“Uh-huh. Thank you.”

“You make me talk about my problems and then you just bottle yours up.”

He laughs through his nose. “Ah-ha. Ain’t nothing bottled up in here, Major,” he says. “Some things are just… better left unsaid.” He makes a gesture with his hand as if drawing a line under the conversation. And then, “It’s just–” he starts pacing again. “If BJ can’t make it work, then who the hell can? Certainly not me! Certainly not Benjamin Franklin ‘Fear of Commitment’ ‘Terminal Bachelor’ ‘I Drive People Away with my Sheer Force of Personality’ ‘Hawkeye’ Pierce! Certainly not him.” He settles again in the center of the tent and looks like he wishes he had a large Rococo armchair to dramatically swoon into.

“Don’t you think you’re being a little premature?” She spares a nervous glance toward her mail. She still hasn’t even opened the letter from her mother. She thinks she might be dreading what’s inside.

“Nuh-uh,” he says. “I’ve tried, and failed, and tried, and failed, and I’m still– but it doesn’t matter. You– I– can we talk about something else?”

“Who’s deflecting now?” she says. He looks at her pleadingly. “Don’t you have other people to be examining?”

“Yeah,” he says, his tone flat. “BJ.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Well. Don’t get too handsy with him. He is a married man, after all.”

“Ha ha.”

They stare at each other. Nobody’s laughing, but at least nobody’s crying either. He’s never really talked to her about anything like that before, his insecurities, his feelings about anything besides the war. She can’t make heads or tails of it, but she thinks it might be a more interesting challenge to deal with than whatever’s waiting for her in that envelope.

“You, um… you can go, Captain,” she says. “Dismissed.”

He looks disappointed, but she’s not sure what he was expecting. “Right.” He nods. “See you, Margaret.”

She sits on her bed and doesn’t read her letter, and writes in her diary about Pierce and Hunnicutt and Frank and Donald and Potter and Klinger and– still so many goddamn men.

Despite the progress she’s been making with them, her nurses still have a lot to learn about respect. They show up late when post-op is slow, they never salute or call her ma’am; some even throw her a dainty fay wave and wiggle their fingers at her a la a certain surgeon who shall remain nickname-less. She goes to Potter about it and he tells her maybe so, but she needs to level her expectations. After all, this is really a hospital first and an army base second.

“But, sir! My nurses are all volunteers. Surely they should be prepared to be as G.I. as– as I say.”

“Major, you’re always saying that the nurses are your responsibility. Why, I wouldn’t want to butt in and get in the way of all that. So can we try and wrap this up quickly? Pierce got some film from back home and we’re having a screening. You’re invited of course.”

“Pierce?! Isn’t anyone on this base capable of having a single conversation that isn’t about Hawkeye Pierce?” Just because they’re… friendly now doesn’t mean she finds his constant need to be the center of attention at all attractive.

Potter looks up from where he’s been casually signing some paperwork. She knows that must seem like a wild non-sequitur but he takes it in stride.

“Well, I hate to break it to you, Major, but he’s important to the people here. I thought he was important to you, too.”

“I– well– sure, I mean– he’s– sure he’s important, but he’s not that important, is he? Important enough that we’re all gathering in here to watch his home movies when there’s inventory to finish, laundry that needs–”

“You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to, Major.”

But she does want to. Not so much because she cares about seeing some grainy footage of the backwoods of Maine (though she won’t deny being curious if they’ll get to meet the illustrious Dr. Pierce the Elder), but more because she’s shocked at how it feels to be included, and not reluctantly. She tries not to dwell on how much she enjoys that the colonel might think of her as just one of the guys. Which is when said guys arrive. Well, Pierce and Hunnicutt anyway.

“Ah, speak of the devil!” Potter says.

“The devil?” Pierce says. “I thought I was Dante.”

“No, you’re Virgil,” Hunnicutt riffs. “ _I’m_ Dante.”

“Well, that’s fine. I always did think your comedy was divine.”

“I know, you _canto_ get enough of it.”

“Ah-ha, very good.”

They are just too cute, aren’t they? It’s almost sickly sweet, the way they talk like it’s scripted. Pierce beams and wordlessly hands Hunnicutt the film to start setting up.

“Radar!” Potter calls, but he’s in the door before he can get the word out, and Klinger and Father Mulcahy trickle in in their own time as well.

“Oh, Major!” Pierce says, flashing his smarmiest smile as if he hadn’t seen her there before. “Here for the matinee? Sorry, I didn’t know you were coming, I would’ve brought something dirtier.”

“Can it, Pierce,” she says, hopping up on the desk beside Hunnicutt, whose legs are practically straddling the back of Pierce’s chair in front of him.

“Can I at least interest you in some popcorn?” Pierce holds out a handful of raisins to her and she rolls her eyes.

“Those are raisins.”

“I knew it tasted funny, Hawk!” Hunnicutt says. “No wonder the extra butter didn’t help.”

“Okay, folks, okay! Let’s simmer down,” Potter says while Radar turns out the lights.

“This is from my friend Amy, she’s a teacher back in Maine,” Pierce explains as the film flickers and begins.

“Testing, testing, one-two-three, is this thing on?” A woman’s voice says in an imitation of a newscaster. “Hey Hawk, it’s Amy.” Her voice continues to play over footage of a classroom full of children putting chalk messages on their blackboard, _Come Home Soon, Hawkeye_ , peace signs and doves and doodles of stethoscopes and thermometers.

“We all really miss you.” Images flash up of waves hitting jagged rocks, of what was probably a beautiful sunset, and of main street in a tiny New England town that looks just like every other tiny New England town.

“I bet you’re sorry you moved away to the big city, now.”

People stop whoever was filming as they walk down the street to ask what they’re doing, and when they get told, they stop and greet Hawkeye into the camera.

“Mrs. Kent was cleaning out her attic and found a load of recording equipment that Mitch left behind, can you believe that? She sold it to me for five dollars on the condition that you come home in one piece.”

A man’s voice takes over while the idyllic picture continues.

“Hey, Hawk,” it says. “I call you ‘Hawk,’ because I know your friends will be listening and I don’t want to embarrass you.” They can all practically hear the twinkle in his father’s eye.

“Let me see if I’ve got all this right. I want to give my best to that BJ of yours, and to Peggy and Erin back in San Francisco. To Radar, and his family back in Iowa and to, uh, to your Colonel… Potter, and his wife, and to the priest, Mulcahy, and his sister the sister. I even want you to give my love to Frank and Margaret, who probably aren’t that bad once you get to know them.” Margaret feels her cheeks flush and is silently grateful the lights are dim. She can’t fucking comprehend that Pierce writes home about her.

“Who else, who else…?” Pierce’s father goes on. “Right! To the only one on camp who thinks he’s crazier than you are, Klinger, and his whole family back in Toledo. Did I get everyone, Ben? If not it’s nothing personal, and they’ll have to forgive an old man his senility.”

Margaret hardly believes what she’s hearing. Pierce’s father gets five minutes to say anything he wants and he spends it giving well-wishes to the rest of them. Even to her. She glances over to Pierce who isn’t even trying to hide the fact that he’s tearing up.

“It’s a dirty, rotten, business, Ben,” his voice continues. “And if you came home yesterday it wouldn’t be soon enough. I miss you, and I love you, and I want you to know that whatever it is you’re thinking of, it’s not your fault. If you can get through one day, and the next day, and the next, then that’s what I’ll do, too, and I’ll be in the chips before you. I, uh… Amy gave me the end of the tape, and it’s about to run out, so, uh, hope this wasn’t too mortifying, and I’ll see you sometime in Tipperary, wherever that is.”

“Don’t worry, Hawkeye, I didn’t forget to say hello in person,” Amy’s voice comes in again. She films the entrance to Dr. Pierce’s office and goes up the stairs. He looks up when she gets there and points to the camera, asking what it’s all about.

“Ah,” they can see him say. He has the same smile as Pierce. Amy centers the camera on him and he gives a two-fingered left-handed salute down the lens. “Give ‘em hell, Hawkeye,” he enunciates so it’ll be clear even with no sound. The film fizzles out while everyone’s looking at Pierce, who’s gone bright red. She’s thankful for that since she doesn’t want anyone to see how her eyes have welled up at the sound of all the love.

BJ squeezes Pierce’s shoulders from behind. He’s grinning so wide Margaret wishes for Pierce’s sake that he could see it; she knows how he loves to see Hunnicutt smile.

“Gee, Hawk,” Radar is the first to speak. “That was real sweet.”

“You said it, Radar,” Hunnicutt adds encouragingly, though he never looks away from Pierce.

“That classroom, at the beginning, those children,” Father Mulcahy says. “How lovely.”

“Yeah, Captain,” Klinger says. “You should tell your old man thanks from all of us. That was– I don’t know what to say, it was so… you should tell him thanks.”

“Yeah,” Pierce says, clearly a little rattled. “I should, uh, I should write Amy back. And my dad. It was, uh… Thanks everybody for being such a lovely captive audience, but I think it’s time for our curtain call. Come on, Beej.” Pierce reaches behind him until he can feel Hunnicutt and practically drags him by the arm toward the doorway.

“Pierce,” Margaret says. He stops and turns around. She wants to tell him he’s lucky, or to thank him for sharing that, or to tell him it was unmilitary, or just to say something, anything, to indicate that she knows that they’re both human but she can’t make her mouth work.

“Yeah?” he says. Hunnicutt’s hand is lingering at his side. 

“Nothing. Never mind.” They leave. “Sir? Can we continue our meeting from before?”

“Certainly, Major,” Potter obliges her, and dismisses Klinger and Mulcahy.

“That family resemblance is really something, huh?” Potter says as he goes to pour himself a drink. He offers Margaret one as well and for once she accepts. She feels like being taken care of, just a little.

“Certainly was, sir,” Margaret agrees, and not just in appearance. Their attitude, that attitude, so totally blasé in place of what should have been military severity. She doesn’t know how they do it, what kind of life you can lead to not at least have some respect for what they’re doing over here. And it just plain figures that Pierce gets it from his dad.

“Well–”

“It just looked so real!” she interrupts. “It looked so easy. ‘Give ‘em hell, Hawkeye,’” she repeats in a slightly mocking tone.

She’s finally managed to shock the colonel, but he recovers quickly. “I, uh… I don’t want to presume, Margaret, but do you, uh…” he struggles with how to put his point delicately.

“Go ahead, sir,” she says. “Say what you need to say.”

“Thank you, Major.” He puts his glass down and looks her straight in the eye. “Do you feel you have to work very hard for your father’s love?”

Her stomach drops and the blood rushes from her face, but she still says, “What?” shrill and dismissive in the way she hates. “Of course not! My– my father loves me very much, he’s very proud of me, he told me just– he tells me when he can. When I’ve earned it.”

In that moment she hates Potter more than anyone else for the look of pity he’s giving her.

“Margaret,” he says, and puts his hand over hers. “You don’t have to act strong around here. You’ll have my respect no matter what.” She tears her hand away.

“How– how dare you! How dare you presume that my father doesn’t– doesn’t love– doesn’t treat me the way he should. How dare you!” Jesus Christ, she sounds just like Pierce when she talks like that.

“Major, I’m not presuming anything,” Potter says calmly. “I think you– I think everyone deserves a love like Hawkeye’s father has for him. I think it was very special that he shared that love with all of us, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I… I think so.” She runs one finger along the rim of her glass. “It’s difficult to be a colonel’s daughter,” she says without looking up. “Did Evvie ever think about a career in the army?”

“Oh, no,” Potter says kindly. “I never discouraged it particularly, but I didn’t encourage it either. The army isn’t always the most forgiving to its, eh, female personnel.” Margaret looks up at him. “Any of its personnel, really.”

“Pierce is rubbing off on you,” Margaret says. “You’re turning soft.”

“Would that be such a bad thing?” Potter sighs. “That boy is a handful, I’ll give you that. But he asks the right questions at the right times. It ain’t his fault if people don’t like the answers.”

“No,” Margaret says. “I guess not.” Potter doesn’t push her to talk more, which is why she feels compelled to. “My father didn’t push me toward the army either, but he also didn’t push me toward anything else. My whole life revolved around it! I didn’t see– I mean I couldn’t even conceive of a future where I didn’t join up in the way that I could.” Potter regards her, steely-eyed behind his glasses. “My mother was a nurse, too. I suppose– yes. I figured I could get his approval that way. But isn’t that what everybody’s doing? Isn’t that what Hawkeye’s doing, too?”

She wishes she didn’t sound it, but she is desperately curious. She just doesn’t see what’s so different between the two of them, two people who wanted to grow up to be their fathers. The difference, she supposes, is that she’s a goddamn girl. She expects Potter’s gaze to stay hard, but instead it softens, and he looks down and smiles.

“Isn’t anyone on this base capable of having a single conversation that isn’t about Hawkeye Pierce?” he repeats her words back to her. She glares at him. He’s so easy to talk to. She wonders if this is how it’s supposed to feel talking to– she doesn’t let her think that, that a man she’s known for less than a year is being a better father to her than the man who’s raised her all her life.

“I guess…” she says. “I’ve never thought that before, that maybe it shouldn’t be this hard.”

Potter looks at her a little sadly, and a little sternly, but his voice is warm when he speaks to her.

“Try not to worry about it, Major, if you can. Our parents shape us, and change us, and we live our lives asking things of them, but they aren’t the be all end all of our existence. You’re a person aside from them, Margaret. A strong, brave, outspoken, intelligent person. And you’ll always have a family here, no matter what’s going on at home.”

She’s working a slow overnight shift with Pierce. She leaves the room for ten minutes on a break and comes back to find him sitting at the desk surrounded by what must be a hundred paper airplanes, still compulsively folding another one as she goes toward him.

“Pierce!” she exclaims without thinking, surprised by the sight.

“Hey,” he says without taking his eyes off his project. He finishes his current plane and drops it on the floor beside him, then immediately picks up another piece of paper and starts folding. She takes a seat in a chair across from him and he gently tosses it into her lap once it’s done.

“Hey,” he says again. His feet are up on the desk, obviously.

“Hey,” she says. She picks up the plane and starts going over the creases. “This isn’t right,” she says, eyeing his folds. “That’s not how you make a paper airplane.”

“What?” he looks up. “Sure it is. Look,” he gestures to the veritable palace of aviation flanking his chair.

“No, I mean, you’re supposed to fold it in half twice first, before you fold down the corners. Look.” She grabs a piece of paper from the desk and starts demonstrating. Pierce watches her with devastatingly rapt attention. When she’s done she launches it across the room without thinking, feeling proud for a moment as it soars smoothly nearly as far as the door before she realizes what a ridiculous and childish thing he’s roped her into.

“Anyway,” she says, regaining her composure. “That’s how you do it.”

“I mean, okay,” Pierce says, taking another sheet and folding another plane his way. “This is just how my dad taught me.”

“Well, then, he didn’t teach you right.”

“Margaret,” he laughs as he says her name, as he so often does. “There’s more than one way to make a paper airplane.” 

She watches him make another. He’s wearing exactly the same expression as he does when he’s operating, like nothing in the universe has ever mattered more than the precise movements of his fingers in this moment. In some ways he’s right, and in some ways he’s crazy. He also makes it look easy; the way he does it is fluid, like he’s moving without thinking, despite his look of serious concentration.

“Keep making that face and it’ll get stuck like that,” she says.

“What?”

“You’re going to bore a hole in the desk.”

He looks annoyed, which is weird because she thought she was being funny. “I’m just trying to pass the time.”

“Sure,” she says, trying extra hard to sound kind. “No problem.” She even considers folding another airplane herself but doesn’t. Instead she picks up an old Life magazine from a pile on the desk (old magazines, like they’re in an actual doctor’s office, she thinks but doesn’t say) and leafs through it past articles about the war until she lands on one about a new skyscraper they’re building in Manhattan. Pierce peers over at it and smiles.

“Is that New York?” he says.

“Yeah, Fifth Avenue. Here, take a look.” She flips the magazine around so he can see. He picks it up and scrutinizes the page.

“Must be near Grand Central,” he says, handing it back to her. “Ah, New York.” He grins and tilts his chair back on two legs, looking away like he’s reminiscing. “The Big Apple of the Empire State, the Emerald of the East Coast, where the streets are paved with diamonds and any young man can fall asleep in the Village and wake up in the Bronx, provided he was on the right subway train. What a town, what a town.”

“I take it you’ve spent some time there?”

“Sure, when I was in medical school, and during my internship at Presbyterian. We had this little place in Harlem, I mean, spitting distance from the Apollo Theater. And what I wouldn’t give, I mean what I wouldn’t give for a slice of pepperoni– no, a sausage and mushroom slice from Sal and Carmine’s.” He clicks his tongue. “Cheese so hot it would melt your eyeteeth! Sauce from fresh plum tomatoes their grandmother was growing in her window box, and the sausage, don’t get me started on the sausage. Pigs straight from the fields of Elysium. Seriously, Major, could I get a Kleenex? My mouth is about to start watering all over your magazine.”

She can’t help it; he makes her laugh with that. He looks a little too pleased with himself for her taste but still, it’s fun when he’s fun and they can have fun. She’s working on coming up with something charming to say in return when Bigelow turns up for her shift. Pierce’s eyes snap up at the introduction of a new character to their little two-hander.

“Doctor, Major,” Bigelow greets them.

“Hellooooo,” Pierce sidles up to her and makes a grand gesture of taking her coat. They flirt for a bit, Pierce offering to make an honest woman out of her, then a dishonest one when she turns him down. Margaret sends her on an errand across the compound just to shut him up. On his way back to the desk he swishes beside a corpsman mopping the floor and just can’t stop himself from propositioning him as well. One of these days Pierce is going to get himself in serious trouble.

“Say, what are you doing after the war?” he says in Private Kaufmann’s ear as if the whole of post-op can’ hear him. “We could go into business together, you know. You wash and I’ll dry.” Kaufmann just laughs and walks away, and when Pierce looks back smiling at Margaret she’s glaring at him.

“Don’t you ever tone it down?” she says. 

“What?” He crashes back down into his seat.

“Your whole… all of this.” She gestures at him vaguely. His expression is completely blank.

“Nope,” he answers. “I come prepackaged for your convenience. Nonrefundable.”

“Hm.”

He laughs incredulously. “Sorry if it annoys you, Major, but if I don’t go crazy every fifteen seconds I’ll lose my mind.” His eyes flick up and he looks like he’s debating whether or not to keep talking. “Maybe you’d be happier if you loosened up a little.”

“How dare you–”

“I just mean of course it would annoy you if I’m having fun if you’re miserable. And you know what your problem is?”

“Oh, do tell.”

“Ha. You’re only miserable because you hold everybody around here to the same impossibly high standards you’re forcing yourself to live up to. And that way obviously no one will ever, uh, you know. Satisfy you.”

“Oh, you are unbelievable.” He has to be joking. And when did this become about her? “As if you don’t do the exact same thing.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“What, you mean because we, we, used to razz Frank in the O.R. for being fifty percent thumb? That’s not an impossibly high standard; that was just us trying to average a C+ for the duration.”

“Oh, please,” she says. “If people aren’t miserable to your exact bleeding-heart specifications you think they’re automatically some kind of fascist!”

His eyes grow wide. He continues in a whisper-yell as it’s still the middle of the night and they’re still surrounded by sleeping patients.

“You think I want everybody to be miserable? You think I– I– I spend my every waking second on this base sewing people up and making people laugh just so they can be unhappy? Jesus, I–” he leans back in his chair and talks as if to himself. “I thought I was doing better than that.”

She supposes in a way that is what he does, try to take in all the bad that’s around them to protect them from it. But it’s not like anyone asked him to. She certainly didn’t.

“Just because you think you have to martyr yourself for our sanity doesn’t mean it’s fair that you think the rules don’t apply to you.”

“Martyr myself? Margaret, I’m just trying to get out of here in one piece! This isn’t martyrdom, it’s goddamn survival.”

“Well, that’s not what it looks like!” She has to stop herself from pounding her fist on the desk in exasperation. “It looks like you think you can just do whatever the hell you like while some of us– while I’m breaking my back every day making sure everything runs like it’s supposed to.”

His expression is wild. “Exactly! Did you even hear what you just said? You’re the only one! The war wouldn’t come crumbling down tomorrow if you stopped following every single rule your father told you you had to, even if maybe I’d prefer if it did.” He seems to notice how far forward he’s sitting and takes a steadying breath. “If the rules don’t suit you– If the rules aren’t right you shouldn’t follow them.”

“Pierce! Not everybody has that luxury.” He’s as goddamn dogmatic as any G.I. she’s ever known; he’s just following a different set of rules. Which means he has absolutely no right to tell her what she should and shouldn’t do.

His jaw clenches. She’s struck guilt. And for some reason she doesn’t let up.

“God, you’re just so…” she lingers, coming up with the right word. “You’re selfish.”

He looks hurt but that’s all right. He doesn’t argue with her.

“Right,” he says. “Fine. So I’m selfish. I– I guess. At least– at least I actually care about being happy. At least I take steps not to make my life a complete and total misery. It’s not like they work but at least I fucking try, since I unlike so many people in this man’s army refuse to believe I’m actually a lost cause.” He stands up so suddenly he nearly knocks his chair over and he scrambles behind him to keep it from falling. Then he starts pacing (obviously) but still only talks loud enough for her to hear. Paper airplanes rustle beneath his feet. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Selfish. Sure. I’m selfish. Selfish because I don’t like doing what people tell me for no goddamn reason other than Uncle Sam says so. Selfish because if I took everything as seriously as I’m apparently supposed to I think my brain would start leaking out of my ears and because I don’t like being shot at and bombed and shelled and fucking _sniped_ every day at my job at the _hospital_ and because I don’t like pulling mountains of lead out of the literal babies I see on my table every day. If that makes me selfish then I don’t even care, even though it’s my fucking prerogative how I act and since you’re not the one who ends up black and blue on the curb outside the hundred and thirteenth street laundromat I don’t really see how this has anything to do with you.”

Margaret freezes. Pierce is still fluid, standing with his hands on his hips and his shoulders sloped down toward her like he doesn’t think he just said anything out of the ordinary. It is so late. It is way too late at night to be having this conversation, any conversation that’s any deeper than small talk. 

“You’re right,” she says softly.

“What?” He inclines his head toward her.

“You’re right! Okay? You’re right. Now will you calm down?”

She internally cringes. _Calm down_ is among the worst things you can say to someone you’re trying to calm down. Something about it seems to work, though, maybe the surprise at her conceding the argument so easily. Mostly she’s scared that if he keeps talking he’ll say something he can’t take back. He returns to his seat again, and balances one foot against the edge of the desk. He starts making another paper airplane.

So maybe he was a real person with a real life before he came here, not just some caricature of a city doctor turned further parody of himself by the onslaught of absurdity that constitutes a war. (That’s how he sees it, anyway. All this makes perfect sense to Margaret.) Maybe things haven’t always been quite as easy for him as she imagined. Maybe he isn’t faking having empathy for all those busted up kids that come through here, playing at being affected by the tragedy for effect. Maybe he isn’t faking having empathy for her, either.

“I’m sorry, Captain,” she says.

“Uh-huh.”

“I think… I think you worry me sometimes.”

He looks up. Hunnicutt has baby-blue eyes. Pierce has something else.

“How touching.”

“We worry about you and then the next day you’re fine. It’s hard to know where we stand.”

He blinks at her. “Sorry,” he says. “I guess.”

“Pardon my build,” she suddenly remembers.

“What?”

“That’s– you said that to me once, when I told you you had bony shoulders.”

He looks at her searchingly for a moment before he bursts out laughing: jarring, crazy, loud, and unlike any sound on the planet. He’s fun, but he must be at least a little insane.

“Oh, Margaret,” he says. “You crack me the hell up. Always have.”

She shakes her head in light disapproval. “Something’s cracked you up, that’s for sure.”

“Don’t I know it,” he sighs, and stretches his arms above him so intensely she can hear what must be his shoulder popping.

That’s the thing, isn’t it? Maybe he’s cracked, maybe he isn’t. But if he is, he knows he is, and he tells them every day. It’s not as if they don’t see it. He’s flipped on a dime three times in the last five minutes (not that Margaret’s any stranger to that phenomenon). She remembers him telling her he was afraid of never finding anyone to settle down with, and she remembers finding it strange since he doesn’t seem like he really wants to. But if he knows how crazy he is, well… She can see how it would make him nervous about his future.

“Pierce?” He snaps back into focus.

“Yo.”

“Do you ever want to get married?” she asks him. She has no idea what she’s asking him, really.

“Uh,” he laughs and scratches the back of his neck. “I don’t know. I don’t really think we’re meant for each other.”

She clicks her tongue. “Not to me, you idiot. In general.”

“Oh, in general,” he says sarcastically.

“Oh,” she repeats in just the same tone.

“I don’t know,” he says, leaning forward with his elbows on the desk. “Everybody thinks that’s what they want, right? Because that’s what you grow up your whole life getting told, so how could you not, you know? But I had the chance, years ago I had the chance and for whatever reason I didn’t take it. So who knows what I want? I want my friends to be safe and warm. I want my dad not to worry about me. I want– who knows if I’ll ever have a family, but one day it might be nice.” He sighs. “I know you’re not interested in starting right now, but, uh, I imagine one day you’re hoping for a gaggle of little Houlihan-Penobscotts running around, running the place?”

She can’t quite read his tone, if it’s mocking or jealous or something else entirely.

“Of course,” she says, because she has to. Because she didn’t want to be pregnant but she’s not supposed to not want that, and she is so, so unused to not doing what she’s supposed to.

“I want a cat,” Pierce says suddenly.

“A cat?”

“I used to have a cat. I still sort of have a cat. Captain Flint. No idea what the hell breed he was or anything, he was just gray with stripes and a mewl that could decimate your eardrums.”

“ _Captain_ Flint?” It’s the first time she’s ever heard him use that word without derision.

“Huh? Yeah. That’s– he’s– that’s the parrot from _Treasure Island_.”

“Naturally.” Right. Of course Pierce is some kind of sentimental, well-read sap. Margaret just doesn’t know how or why he hides it so well. Or does he…? She doesn’t have time to dwell on it.

“Anyway he was horrible, scratched up all the furniture and ate toothpaste and pissed on Carlye’s rug and everything–”

“Sounds perfect for you.”

He grins. “Right. But obviously, I mean– anyway I had to leave him with my friends when I got drafted. He’s still fine, though. I get updates. I’d love to– I mean, I really wish I could take him back after the war, but… I don’t know.”

“Of course you can take him back,” she reassures him. “He sounds awful enough, I’m sure your friends will be thrilled to offload him.”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” He looks down. She’d never quite known before what “wistful” looked like but she thinks this is it. “I just– I think once I go home… I won’t be able to take care of anybody else for a while. Which is too bad because I’ve sort of made a career out of it– anyway. And Flint’ll probably be dead by the time I’m ready,” he says matter-of-factly.

“Huh,” she says. Ten minutes ago she was calling him selfish. He probably thinks she’s the selfish one.

“So why do you– I mean, why did you ask about that?” he says. “I know it’s not just because you’re warm for my form.”

“Certainly not,” she says, notably less stonily than she might have a few months ago. Something about his flirting lacks conviction these days. Maybe it’s because she’s married. Maybe it’s because Hunnicutt is.

He leans back again and twirls a pen between his fingers. “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I guess, I mean, I suppose it’s because I really thought I did. Want to get married, that is. And then I did. I am. And it’s– it’s weird. It doesn’t change you. You’re still just however you were when you couldn’t get married.”

She exhales and feels like it’s the first time she’s done so in a month.

“Huh,” he says, nodding slowly. “Right. I guess– I mean, I guess that makes sense. What changes you, you know? It’s not a piece of paper or a ring, I don’t think. It’s stuff, you know, it’s people. Experiences. Happenings. A particularly orgasmic order of soup dumplings from that new place down on Mott.” He raises his eyebrows like _so there._

“You know what, Hawkeye? I definitely believe you would find that life-changing.”

“Yeah, well,” he says, smiling a real smile, broad and uncontrollable, like he doesn’t mind at all the things she knows about him. Absently he glances behind him out the window. “Would you look at that?” he says. “Sunrise.”

“Gosh,” she says. “Is it really?” Hours and hours spent with only Pierce for company. Who would’ve thought the day would come when she wouldn’t dread that? And the sunrise is always beautiful, even over the compound. Maybe especially. “Well then. Good morning, Captain.”

“Good morning,” he says softly. “We’ve talked the whole night through, huh?” All of a sudden he looks so tired. The way he acts it can be hard to remember he’s just like the rest of them, walking around in a perpetual state of exhaustion.

“It’s one way to pass the time.” She moves to stand and start prepping for the shift change, but he reaches over and taps her arm.

“Wait, Major. Let me just– Can I ask you a question?”

“I suppose you’ve earned it.”

“Yeah.” One corner of his mouth flicks up. “What do you want, Margaret?”

“What?”

“I mean…” he taps his fingers on the desk and fidgets with another piece of paper. “Do you want to fit in, or do you want to stand out?”

“I–” The room feels colder than it did a minute ago. “Are those my only options?” The conversations you’re willing to have with people when you’ve been up all night with them.

“Maybe,” he says. “I think– in my experience, anyway. I don’t– it’s not like I have answers, or advice, or any right to tell you how to live your life. I just wonder sometimes. Because you say stuff like you do, like imagining being married with kids and owning two houses and a thirty-five thousand dollar car or whatever, and then you up and join the army, and I don’t know if you know this but that’s not normal for a girl.”

Her brow furrows but he’s not saying it to belittle her. He’s saying it because it’s true.

He goes on, “Of course then once you’re in the army it’s all about conforming again, following orders, I mean, literally not being able to choose what you do practically any second of the day…” he trails off like he’s not quite sure what point he’s trying to make either. “Just food for thought, I guess.”

“Right.” See? The army’s not the only one who drops bomb. They both see the clock strike the hour but he motions for her to stay while he does the last round of check ups. He doesn’t even wait for her to reply, he just takes his stethoscope and leaves. Food for thought indeed.

Maybe that’s her problem. She wants to be told what to do. She needs to, since she thinks if it was up to her she’d never make the right choice. And the army’s the catch-all, it does absolutely everything for you: what to do, what to wear, what to eat, even good and bad and right and wrong. Then at the same time she never wants to listen to anybody but herself, so what is she even doing here? Is this how everybody else feels all the time?

Hawkeye says the world is built on contradictions. Marx says that, too. _Gee Mom,_ Margaret thinks. _I wanna go home_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so: the “I think I’m infatuated with you” exchange is adapted from ‘the seduction of Joe tynan,’ an Alan Alda movie which I watched a few weeks ago and obviously had to steal dialogue from. I think Colonel Potter’s daughter is referred to as Evvie or something like that (like short for Evelyn) in the one where her husband cheats on her but I really can’t be bothered to rewatch s11 episodes unless I absolutely have to and also the writers were literally allergic to consistency when it came to potter's backstory 
> 
> Sal and carmine’s is a real, relatively serviceable pizza place near columbia but it wasn’t actually established till 1959. So it goes
> 
> Up next: among other things, hawkbeej houlifield poker night extravaganza :)


	4. B. J. and Helen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> chapter 4 aka men stink

Don’t go thinking it’s Hawkeye Pierce who’s turned Margaret against this interminable war. Don’t go thinking it’s just him, anyway. It’s that very fact, its interminability that makes her hate it. It’s the fact that despite everything she’s been taught, it’s still hard to figure out what exactly it is they’re fighting for. And _they’re_ not even fighting! It’s hard to know why whoever is doing this bothers fighting if they’re so desperate to get everybody sewn back up afterwards, enemies and prisoners included. If everyone’s so desperate for everyone to go home safe, desperate enough that they’ll keep Pierce and Hunnicutt and Winchester here until they’ve stitched up seemingly every soldier in Korea, why don’t they call it a wash and send everybody home instead?

She writes those thoughts down in her diary and has to stop herself from scratching them out when she imagines what her father would say if he read them. She’s not a coward, she tells herself, for thinking things would be better if there were peace. She’s not a coward, she’s not, she’s not, she’s not. She starts to feel crazy for ever thinking this was okay in the first place. (She starts to feel crazy, as crazy as Pierce is, for knowing it’s not.) She thinks a lot about getting a job in a real hospital when this is over. Leave it to the war to ruin her brilliant military career. On top of that she’s getting a divorce, her marriage just another thing that’s been ruined.

She decides to drown her sorrows one evening and when she turns up to the O-Club obviously Pierce and Hunnicutt are already there, Hawkeye sitting on the bar while BJ tosses olives into his mouth from across the room. She almost gets pelted with one when she startles them.

“Aah! Sorry, Margaret,” Hunnicutt says.

“Margaret, watch this,” Pierce says. “He must be twenty feet away from me! Watch this, watch.”

Hunnicutt makes a big show of preparing, sending joke pitching signals and feigning a few times before launching the olive in a gentle arc over to Pierce, who leans back too far, misses, and falls behind the bar with a theatrical _crash!_

“Hawk! You okay?” Hunnicutt rushes over and nearly catapults himself over the bar but stops when he and Margaret both hear the distinctive sound of Pierce’s laughter. Then they see him emerge and dust himself off before wiping tears of joy out of his eyes.

“And with that, lady and germ, I’m afraid I must bid you adieu, as I am a-due in post-op,” he checks Hunnicutt’s watch, “ten minutes ago.”

“Pierce!” Margaret says, just refraining from stomping her foot.

“Houlihan!” he repeats back to her in a shrill tone. Hunnicutt shoots her an apologetic glance and shrugs. “See you later, Beej,” Pierce says on his way out. “Meet me after my shift?”

“Our usual spot?”

“It’s a date.” And the door swings shut behind him.

“Well, Margaret, what can I do you for?” Hunnicutt says, slinging a dish towel over his shoulder and electing himself bartender.

“Oh, I don’t know. Fix me one of whatever you’re drinking.”

“I’m not drinking anything.”

A beat. “You were in here not drinking?”

“Hawk had post-op duty. We just came in for a change of scenery.”

“Oh.” _Something_ is going on between those two and Margaret does not know what. Hunnicutt’s far too much on the straight and narrow for there to be any… _shenanigans_ going on, no matter how much Pierce might wish there were.

“Let me get you a martini,” he says. “It’s the only thing I know how to make.”

“A good enough reason as any,” Margaret says, and takes a seat at the bar. She downs it in one go when Hunnicutt places it in front of her and he only looks slightly judgmental as he refills her glass. This time he makes one for himself as well but sips it slowly.

“My husband–” she starts.

“Ex-husband.”

She points at him in acknowledgment. “My ex-husband, Donald Penobscott–”

“Lieutenant Colonel Donald Penobscott.”

“Lieutenant Colonel Donald Penobscott–”

“Of West Point.”

“Of West Point,” she repeats. “Is a no-good low-down dirty rotten… fink!”

“Right,” Hunnicutt nods, looking impressed. “You know, you can use stronger language than that if you like. It won’t offend my sensibilities… that much.”

“Wouldn’t you just love that, to hear me swear.”

“I just thought it might help.”

She stares at him for a long moment. His eyes are soft, and warm, but sometimes she thinks he might actually be devious. (Why else would Pierce love him so much?) She downs the rest of her second drink.

“Get ready,” she warns.

“I’m braced for impact.”

“Okay. MY EX-HUSBAND IS A PIECE OF SHIT!” she yells. “How was that?”

“You tell me.”

“Actually, it felt pretty good.”

“What’d I tell you?”

She raps her fingers on the bar and indicates she wants another round. Hunnicutt obliges.

“You’re a pretty nice guy, aren’t you? As nice guys go?”

“I like to think so,” Hunnicutt says, winning smile included.

“You ever, uh, look around?” He raises his eyebrows by way of asking for clarification. “Do something in Tokyo you don’t plan on reporting in San Fransisco, if you know what I mean?”

“Never,” he says, his expression unwavering. She tries to stare him into breaking. She remembers Hawkeye freaking out because BJ was having marriage troubles or something like that, but the bastard is goddamn impenetrable.

“Huh,” she says.

“Surprised?”

“No,” she says. “I mean, it’s the right answer. Why should I be surprised?”

“I don’t know, why should you?”

She looks down and contemplates the rim of her glass. “Because my husband–”

“Ex-husband.”

“Shut up.”

“Sorry.”

“Because my husband cheated on me. And I cheated on him.” With Pierce no less! She finally meets Hunnicutt’s gaze again and he looks suitably sympathetic. “You’re sure you’ve never done anything like that?” She’s not sure why she’s so desperate for them to be in the same boat except that they are in so many other respects.

“Pretty sure,” he says.

“Never even been tempted?”

“Well, tempted’s another story.”

“Ohh,” she says, rolling her eyes knowingly. “You’ve been tempted, then.”

“Well, no. But it’s another story.”

“You fink,” she says. “Though I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. I know you only have eyes for Pierce– Peg! For Peg.”

He laughs and she can’t quite tell if he’s forcing it or not. “That’s okay, I like Hawkeye plenty, too.”

“I’m sure,” she says. “Okay, line ‘em up, barkeep.”

He pours. “Tell me when, Margaret.”

“Men stink,” she says, because they do.

“Close enough.”

Men stink. After General Weisskopf leaves Margaret drinks a toast to herself. Then another. She doesn’t overdo it; she’s not trying to drink herself into oblivion. She’s just celebrating.

She leafs through her meager collection of records for something not too sappy but not too military either; now is not the time for the 1812 Overture purloined from Winchester, for example. “Rhapsody in Blue,” she decides will suit her, and while the opening notes play she experiments with moving her body to the music. It’s a long time since she screamed at her mother to take her out of ballet classes but she still remembers some of the basics. She pirouettes into an arabesque and she feels a revitalizing stretch through her whole body.

As the piece picks up she doesn’t think so much about the moves anymore, just going where her body takes her, bending and turning and leaping across her tent as far as she can without smashing into the canvas. After nearly fifteen minutes of this her hair is plastered to her forehead and she’s breathing hard in an exhilarating way that she has to stop herself from thanking God there’s no men around to hear. She collapses on her bed and fishes around in her bedside drawer for the nail polish she knows is in there, a garish purple color she borrowed from Klinger weeks ago but never used. She lets the rest of the song play out while her breathing returns to normal, then flips it and paints her nails to the American in Paris ballet.

After she finishes she feels a burning desire to write in her diary about all the things she can do now that she’s putting herself first and doesn’t even wait for her nails to dry. Smudges be damned, she’s not making herself beautiful for anyone besides herself, and if she wants to write then damn it, she shall! She’s so enraptured in her task that hours may as well have passed when she’s startled out of it by a rapping at the door.

“What!” she calls.

“It’s Hawkeye,” comes the reply.

“Go away, Pierce! I’m swearing off men.”

“Okay. Me, too.”

“Ugh!” She rolls her eyes and gets up to answer the door. “What do you want?”

He laughs when he sees her reddened cheeks and mussed hair, and possibly her ruined nail polish.

“I wanted to make sure you were okay, but I guess I’m a little late for that. I was just on my way home and I saw Weisskopf leaving in a huff, I didn’t know if something bad happened, or…” he trails off, and shrugs.

“Nothing bad, no. Quite the opposite, actually.” She can’t find it in herself to stay annoyed with him. “Come on in, Hawkeye, let me buy you a drink. You know, some days I really do think of you as one of the girls.”

“Oh, uh, okay,” he says, nodding however skeptically as she lets him in. “That’s very egalitarian of you.”

It’s sweet if he is worried. It’s sweet if he just wants to see her. And even if he doesn’t, she’s going to have fun this evening if it’s the last thing she ever does, and if Hawkeye wants to bear witness she’ll take it.

She pours him a drink and they clink glasses.

“What are we drinking to?” he asks.

“To me, obviously.”

“Fair enough.” He takes a large sip and she follows suit. He peers around the tent. “Seems like there was a wild party going on, but there’s nobody here.”

“That’s the idea, Captain.”

“Ah. Our Medusa’s the subject of a little, uh, self-fulfilling prophecy?” he says, his voice laced with innuendo. 

“Tsk!”

“Hey, don’t be ashamed, Margaret, I think it’s great. Just the other day I was telling Radar how important it is to let girls sometimes, you know, put in their own lightbulbs.”

“Could you _be_ any more obscene?”

“Easily.” He grins cheekily then it deflates back to sympathetic. “I’m just messing with you, Major. I’m glad if you’re having a good evening.” He raises his glass in toast again and takes a sip.

“I am,” she confirms. “I just finished with my nails, come take a look.” She holds out the paint job for him and he laughs.

“Margaret! That color’s horrible!”

“I know!”

“I love it!” He laughs again, hysterically and loud and like he’s struggling not to double over. It’s perfectly catching and soon she’s wiping tears from her eyes as well.

“Want me to do yours, too?”

“Maybe another time.”

Margaret puts on another jazz record, something swiped from the office when that last shipment came in and the two of them sit on opposite ends of her bed with a stash of magazines between them, flipping through and showing each other funny advertisements and interesting articles. They sort of… gossip. It’s sort of like what she imagines being friends with her nurses would be like if they’d let her, Hawkeye telling her all the good dish from his hometown and complaining lovingly about BJ’s jealous streak. She tells him stories about her and Lorraine that he missed because he was swapped with the 8063rd and the genuine way he laughs reminds her of being a student, the way she was before she seemed to live confined only in the molds of others.

When he’s nearly asleep across the foot of her bed with his feet up on a chair beside it he mumbles that he should probably go, and heaves himself up without even a suggestion that she should do it for him. He smiles warmly at her as he pushes open the door.

“G’night, Margaret.”

“Wait, Pierce.” He stops. “Were you really worried about me?”

He takes a step back inside and thinks. “I don’t know. Yes. No. I don’t know.”

“Oh?”

“Well… I’ll say this. If I was worried it’s because sometimes I thought it was a little strange that all these top brass, you know, who’ve known you since you were yea high or whatever are all trying to sleep with you now that’s you’re, you know. I mean, you’ve seen yourself in the mirror, right?”

“Pierce!”

He holds his hands up. “I’m just saying! If he was a creep and he did something creepy… Yeah, I guess I would worry.”

“Well, you don’t have to. I can look after myself, you know.”

“I know, believe me, I know.” He looks like he might shut up after that but of course he doesn’t. He’s Pierce; he’s allergic to just letting things lie. “It’s just, well– you’re the one that asked him here, after all. I saw you how looked at him, I’ve seen how you look at everyone who’s come through here ranked Colonel or higher since I got here, I’ve had to pick your jaw off the floor myself. I mean, the way you look at some of these guys I swear you could fog Radar’s glasses from across the room, you know?”

“Captain!” How very fucking dare he.

“Well, come on, Major, you used to just about hit the roof whenever I tried it on with you! But one look from a general and you’d be putty. Isn’t that strange? They’re the ones who have all the rank, the prestige, the…” he waves his arm and searches for words.

“I– G– Well– _That’s_ what makes them attractive. Honestly, Pierce–” she scoffs.

“ _That’s_ what makes them attractive? No, no, no, no, no,” he says, five in a row like it’s one long word. “That’s what gives them power over you. Meanwhile, I’m just some guy and technically you outrank me.”

“Technically?”

“All right, and you outrank me.”

“Well, I–” She gets up off her bed and stands to face him. She tries not to hate him for being tall. “First of all, Captain, how I conduct my affairs is none of your business.”

“Oh, they’re your affairs, are they?”

She ignores him. “Second of all, even if there was something strange about that, which there wasn’t,” there wasn’t, was there? “that’s all behind me now. Like I said, I’m swearing off men.”

“Uh-huh. Like I said, so am I.”

“And third of all, since when do you care a lick about how I’m doing when it comes to things like that? Since when do you have any scruples whatsoever?” Since never is since when. Since he was happy to see her harassed twelve ways till Tuesday until they started getting along.

“Well, since, I–”

“You think oh, I must be so hurt, so scared and vulnerable, and you can just waltz in here and take advantage!”

“What? No, Margaret, of course not–”

“And what about you, huh? How come whenever somebody comes through here and says you’re a communist or a fruitcake or any number of other manifestly likely things you just act like he secretly wants to bend you over a table?”

Neither of them can believe she just said that. They each take an actual, physical step back from each other. Pierce’s eyes grow wide for a moment before he breaks out in a contained, nervous laughter, just for a second.

“Do I do that?”

“Pierce. I, uh. I didn’t mean anything by that.” She doesn’t think she did anyway. If she did she doesn’t know what she would mean. She was just desperate; she would have said anything to get to focus of the conversation off of her.

“No, no, no, it’s okay,” he says, looking like he might be making silent calculations of some sort. He scratches at the back of his head. “How about a deal. I’ll worry about you and you worry about me. Make it a two-way street.”

Margaret exhales through her nose. “Maybe it’s better that way,” she says. “Especially if neither of us can be trusted to worry about ourselves.”

He breaks out in a smile again, a real one, goofy and crooked, and bids her goodnight with an accompanying signature wave. She wraps her robe around herself and picks up her diary again. Her hands are shaking with some mixture of fear, rage, and guilt and she imagines Pierce may be feeling similarly. She writes an entry cursing every general who knew her twice, once as a girl and once as a woman, cursing her father for never trying to protect her and for teaching her that she should never rely on anyone else for their help, and cursing Hawkeye Pierce for making her fucking think about it.

The war trudges the hell on and Margaret Houlihan is alone. Every step forward with Pierce-Hunnicutt-Winchester actually involves two steps back and the nurses are still basically afraid of her and the ones that aren’t think she’s a cold bitch. (The worst part about that is she actually understands why.) She likes Potter, and she trusts him, but she wouldn’t really consider him a _friend_. Pierce and Hunnicutt are buddies with Klinger and Father Mulcahy but she doesn’t know if she’s destined for close bonds with a crossdressing corpsman or a Catholic chaplain. It’s incredible, with all the love she so often sees going on around her, but some days she is utterly, utterly friendless. 

And so, Margaret cannot believe her luck when Helen is assigned to the 4077th. Helen. The face that launched a thousand Sherman tanks (with body and wit to match). The one person who’s in nearly all of Margaret’s happy memories and plenty of her bad ones, too. One of the only people who’s able to make her laugh in a way that comes from her diaphragm instead of her chest. She’s here. Her being there reminds Margaret why she joined up in the first place: to meet women like herself, with a zest for life and a passion for hard work, who don’t take shit from anybody and have the confidence to put themselves first. And, presumably, to serve her country. She stands impatiently in the compound when Helen’s jeep is due like a child eagerly awaiting the start of their playdate.

“Captain Whitfield!” she all but screams when she sees her pull up.

“Major Houlihan!” comes Helen’s voice, and Margaret sees her scrambling to exit the jeep before it’s even stopped. They both shriek and run into each other’s arms and Margaret feels for a split second like she’s in a beautiful dream.

“Oh, Helen, it’s so good to see you!” Margaret says into her shoulder.

“Margaret! Come on, let me get a look at you.” Helen pulls out of the hug but keeps her grip on Margaret’s shoulders and looks into her eyes and all over her face. “Babydoll, you look fantastic. Just seeing you is like a balm all over my heart.”

“You said it, Helen, you really said it. Come on, get your things, let me help you get moved in.”

It’s the middle of the day so the rest of the nurses are on duty. They have the tent to themselves while Helen gets set up.

“So, what’s everybody like here– oh, would you look at that?” Helen holds up an old photograph of the two of them in San Antonio wearing their fathers’ hats and epaulets.

“Charming!” Margaret says, handing it back to her. “I’ve got the ones from Niagara Falls over my bed.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Would I kid you? I’ll just have to show you later if you don’t believe me.”

“I’m holding you to that, Houlihan.”

“The people here are pretty fantastic,” Margaret says, seamlessly returning to Helen’s question from earlier. “The C.O. is a good man, a really good man, and the doctors are excellent, the best in the business, even if they are a couple of goofballs. Pierce and Hunnicutt especially.”

“Pierce and Hunnicutt?”

“Hawkeye and BJ.”

“ _Hawkeye_ and _BJ_? Are they from a movie or something?”

“Most days, yeah. They’re– they’re angry. Well, you know how draftees can be. But we’re lucky that they do tend to channel all that righteous anger into harmless craziness. At least, you know, we hope it’s harmless…”

“Right.” Helen looks like she thinks she might be in a little over her head for a conversation that’s taking place while she’s folding her underwear. “And what about the nurses?”

“The nurses? Oh, yes. A good bunch. Very skilled. Very competent. No, truthfully, I couldn’t ask for a better staff, honestly, these are some of the best girls I’ve ever worked with.”

“Good, that’s good. But are they friendly?”

“Friendly?”

“You know, are they nice?”

“W– well, yes, I suppose so. Yes, perfectly nice.”

Helen holds her eye contact for a long moment. Warm eyes, warm brown hair, warm and friendly smile; Helen Whitfield is brimming with warmth in a way that makes Margaret wonder what the hell she’s doing with her, the proverbial queen of iciness.

“You can take it easy on yourself, you know,” Helen finally says.

“What?” Margaret strains to keep her voice steady.

“If you’re not sure if they’re nice– I mean, if you’re worried they don’t like you I’m sure you’re just imagining it.”

“Really, Helen, I’m not–“ she doesn’t even know what she’s about to say so she’s glad when Helen cuts her off.

“Anyone on this base would be lucky to have you as a friend. And they’d love to if they got to know you! Margaret, you just have to let them in,” she says casually while putting a stack of shirts in a drawer.

“I–” she wants to tell Helen that’s very kind. She wants to say well, that’s all well and good but she doesn’t have to let anyone else in and worry how wrong it’ll go now that she’s got Helen back. Instead she just goes to where she’s facing away, arranging her cubby and hugs her from behind. “Guess who,” she says. It’s a game they used to play often.

“Myrna Loy?” Helen guesses. “Marilyn Monroe? Bette Davis?”

“Right,” Margaret says. “All three times.”

Helen turns around to face her again. “I want to hope the war is over soon, but it’s hard when the longer it lasts, the longer I’ll get to stay here. With you.”

Isn’t that just the thing? Margaret makes a mental note to ask Pierce how he deals with that re: Hunnicutt.

“You know you’re my best friend?” Margaret says as she steps back and makes for the door. She is on duty after all and she doesn’t like to abuse her position as head nurse by taking extra breaks. “I don’t think I’ve ever gotten along with anyone so well in my life.”

“That goes double for me.” Helen beams.

“This is kind of a rotten place, but you might just make it more bearable, you know? I almost can’t wait to work with you.”

“And at the same time hope a lick of work never comes our way?”

“Right,” Margaret says, halfway between mournful and giddy. “See you soon, Helen. Captain Whitfield, that is.”

Helen smiles even wider, which Margaret shouldn’t have thought possible. “Major.”

And Margaret goes, not quite sure why her heart is palpitating, and heads to post-op. After a few minutes in there she isn’t giddy anymore. 

If Lorraine Anderson was Trapper John McIntyre, then Helen Whitfield is BJ Hunnicutt. She arrives at the 4077th and stops the whole world from turning. Margaret just can’t say no to her, not that she ever wants to. It’s just rare for someone to have that kind of power over her, that kind of sway. She thinks she might do anything in the world to keep Helen smiling.

She knocks and peeks her head in Margaret’s tent before she’s had time to respond.

“Oh, Major, anybody home?” she asks with a smile that Margaret tries not to think is flirty.

“I’m right here, Captain, what is it?”

Helen lets herself in. “I’m playing poker in the Swamp tonight, you want in?”

“The Swamp? Why?”

“Why? Hawkeye asked me.” Helen smiles innocently.

“Hawkeye?!?” She just knows he’s up to something.

“What’s the big deal? I thought you were friends.”

“We– we are, basically.”

“Serviceably.”

“Passably.”

“So?”

“So buttons. Yes, I’m in.”

“Great. Hawk says we ante up at eight-thirty, enough time to upchuck after dinner.”

“See you there.”

“With bells on. Bye, Margaret.” And she lets herself out.

Apparently there is some kind of logistical error or clerical screw up resulting in Margaret and Helen being the only two who show up for the game that night. But, officers and gentlemen that they are, Pierce and Hunnicutt insist the game go forward, provided the ladies present are in agreement about that. They are. No use passing up a good poker night on account of Klinger’s unavailability, even though Margaret remains somewhat skeptical that anyone else was even invited in the first place.

Hunnicutt shuffles the cards and hands them to Pierce who deals.

“So, Captain Whitfield,” Pierce starts.

“Please, only my closest friends call me Captain Whitfield. My work acquaintances call me Helen.”

“Ah.” Pierce smiles in the impressed way he does whenever BJ makes the worst pun you’ve ever heard. “So, Helen– straight draw, jacks or better to open– whereabouts do you hail from? Beej and I feel like we hardly know you.”

“That’s because you hardly know me. Open for two bucks,” she says. Margaret can’t help but feel proud at how she matches him pound for pound.

Pierce nudges BJ with his elbow and stage whispers, “She’s avoiding the question.”

“I’m from Virginia,” Helen says. “Near Richmond.”

“Oh, very nice,” Hawkeye says. “Beej knows this already, but I could only ever be with someone from the East Coast.”

“How nice for the both of you,” Margaret interjects. She has nothing but she bets anyway. “I see your two and raise you a dollar.”

Hunnicutt makes a big show of scrutinizing everyone’s expressions. “Oh, what the hell? Caution to the wind, am I right?” He puts three dollars in the pot.

“Very daring, Beej,” Hawkeye says dryly. “I’m in, too. That’s three to you, Captain– sorry, Helen.”

“Call. Why do I get the feeling Margaret’s brought me home to meet her parents?”

“Just a trick of the light,” Pierce says. “What can I get you?”

“Two please, and make it snappy.”

“Two for the captain,” Pierce says as he deals them. “Major?”

“Three for me.” All duds. She’ll fold on her next turn.

“Just one for me, dear,” Hunnicutt says, holding out his hand.

“One for BJ, and dealer takes three. All right, Helen, you opened.”

“Hawkeye,” she says. “Hawkeye, Hawkeye, Hawkeye. I get the feeling you’re my main competition tonight.”

Margaret sees BJ’s grip tighten around his cards and doesn’t know what to make of it.

“You won first place in the Maine competition, didn’t you, Hawk?” BJ says.

“Three years running. They hold it live at the Thermidor,” Pierce riffs.

“Cheating can get you in a lot of hot water.”

“Oh! That’s pretty bad,” Pierce says.

“I’m sorry, there’s not always like this,” Margaret says to Helen via Pierce through clenched teeth.

“Careful, Hawk, Miss Houlihan says we have to be on our best behavior.”

“Good point. Hey, this is a rough school, you really don’t want to get detention here. You know, one time, this doctor who used to be stationed here tried to have me hang–”

“That’s enough, Pierce!” Margaret says. He seems to get the message: No Frank talk.

“All right, okay. What’s the bet, Captain?”

“Two more dollars,” Helen says. “Your move, honey.”

“Fold,” Margaret says, and leans back to sip her drink. McIntyre used to call her (and everybody) “honey.”

“Too rich for your blood, Margaret?” BJ teases. “Me, too. I’m out.”

“Looks like it’s just you and me, kid,” Pierce says. “And I see your two, and raise you five more.”

Helen stares at him wearing an attractive smirk. Pierce stares back and drums his fingers on his deck.

“Call,” she says evenly, and places her five in the pot. “Let’s see ‘em, Cowboy.”

“Straight,” Pierce says, placing his hand down confidently.

“Straight?” Helen laughs. “Full house. Tens over sixes.” She reveals her cards and BJ looks suitably impressed. Pierce looks quietly proud as well, like somehow he orchestrated the whole thing.

“Very nice, Captain,” he says. “Let’s go again. Your deal.” He gathers up the cards and hands them to Helen. While she shuffles he pours everyone another round, except Helen who’s just having orange juice secreted from the mess tens in a canteen. Margaret shoots Pierce a warning glance not to overdo it while one of them is sober and he at least gives a fleeting look of recognition. Whatever. He’s not her problem. (Except that Helen is. But she seems to be doing fine. In fact, she seems to be having fun.)

The game easily goes on for hours. Helen makes Hawkeye laugh hysterically and even BJ has to begrudgingly admit that she’s got a sense of humor, no matter how much it tortures him to see other people get that kind of reaction from Pierce.

“I haven’t been cleaned this bad in ages!” Pierce says. “Whitfield, you’re playing me like I’m a rookie.”

“That’s only because you play like one,” Helen says back.

“Beej, she’s too fast for me, can you catch her?”

“I can try, but I didn’t bring my running shoes. Where’d you learn to play like this, Whitfield?” BJ asks her.

“From my father,” Helen says. “Taught me everything I know.”

Margaret nods along for a second before she realizes that’s not true. Helen’s father never taught her poker; she didn’t even know the rules when they met on their first assignment and Margaret had to arrange for her to have secret lessons from Sergeant Chester, the finest card shark she knew. Helen doesn’t even look to her for corroboration since she knows Margaret will go along with it, whatever she says.

“Uh-huh,” Pierce says, reclining in his chair and putting his feet in Hunnicutt’s lap. “Mine too. Told me if you can’t bluff your way through a pair of threes, you’ll never bluff your way through anything.”

Hunnicutt shoves Pierce’s feet off of him and starts gathering up the cards. Hawkeye pouts and swivels to use Margaret as a footrest before she pushes him away, too.

“You guys are no fun whatsoever,” he says, and primly crosses one leg over the other.

“What about me, am I fun?” Helen says.

Margaret cuts off whatever wisecrack Pierce is about to make. She just couldn’t stand to see him flirt with Helen; she won’t subject her to it.

“What about you, BJ? Where did you learn to play?”

“Me?” Hunnicutt says. “After chess club every Thursday. Mr. Matheson, the geometry teacher, would stay late to teach me and Angie Chu how to hustle. He was a real whiz. You know, years later I found out he went to jail.”

“What?” Margaret says. Pierce is smiling like he knows this is a set up.

“For shooting craps at a mathematicians’ convention. He could tell you the precise dimensions of his jail cell from fifty paces. Doesn’t make it any easier to bust out, of course.”

Weird. Sometimes Hunnicutt says stuff that is just weird. They go on like that, swapping jokes and stories about growing up. Pierce and Hunnicutt love putting on a show but more than anything they seem to live for each other’s laughter, and each think the other is the cleverest, funniest person in the world even though they are both patently idiots. Even so, Margaret’s glad they invited her and Helen. They think she belongs there. This place has become almost like a home to her and she didn't even notice.

Pierce keeps nodding off, his elbow giving way beneath him and his head nearly hitting the table, so Hunnicutt hauls him up and puts him in bed. He drapes a blanket over him and lays a hand on his forehead like he’s forgotten they aren’t alone in the world. Margaret can see McIntyre standing just like that over Pierce’s bed in post-op, clear as day. She can feel Helen’s knee touching hers under the table as sharp as a pinprick. Margaret stands abruptly, her chair screeching as she pushes it back, startling Hunnicutt out of his daze by his instinct to shush her, but his expression softens when he remembers it’s them, just them, and Margaret reaches down to tug on Helen’s arm.

“Come on,” she whispers. “Why don’t we leave the boys to their own devices.”

“Hm?” Helen looks up at her wearing an entranced expression not unlike BJ’s.

“Just come on,” Margaret says, and pulls her out of the Swamp. She ducks back inside for a split second. “Hey, BJ.”

“Yo,” comes the answer, softly.

“Thanks for– just thanks.”

“Anytime, Major. Really. And hey,” he says. “Sweet dreams.” 

It’s the dead middle of the night. Margaret, Helen, and BJ might as well be the only three people awake on the whole camp. Helen walks Margaret back to her tent.

“I could tuck you in if you want,” Helen says when they reach the threshold. Eternities pass while they stand there in the brisk air, Margaret inside and Helen out. There is absolutely no one around. Margaret feels like she’s on the bow of the Titanic.

Feelings bubble up inside her and she shoves them back down. It’s what she’s been doing her whole life, and it works right up until it doesn’t. It works until they come screaming out of her, icy and shrill in a way that makes people roll their eyes or cower in fear when they see her coming. And despite all that, everyone keeps telling her she has to let love in. Lorraine, telling her she’s got a camp full of people to talk to, Helen telling her basically the same. Even Pierce, in his own inimitable way, every time he says she’ll feel better if she opens up and talks about what’s bothering her is just telling her to make room for love in her life.

Margaret tries desperately not to be ashamed. She’s spent the whole evening watching Helen love making her and the captains laugh, and watching Hawkeye be so achingly in love with BJ that he doesn’t know what to do except joke about it. Whatever he’s feeling, it isn’t shame. Helen doesn’t feel any shame, either; if she did she wouldn’t have rubbed it in their faces all night how horribly she was beating them. Margaret decided she was going to live for herself, didn’t she? And if this is who she is, then what choice does she have?

“Well, here we are,” Margaret says.

“Here we are,” Helen agrees.

Margaret brings her face up to Helen’s like she’s going to share a secret. She’s not blind. She’s seen how Helen’s eyes flick to her lips when they talk. She’s seen it, she knows she has. And when Helen doesn’t move Margaret knows she’s right. So she goes for it. She kisses her.

It’s relatively quick, and relatively chaste, but there’s no mistaking it. Margaret just kissed her best friend square on the lips for anyone to see (except for the fact that it’s nigh on four in the morning and there isn’t a soul around. _There’s one twenty miles south of here,_ a voice that sounds awfully like Hunnicutt’s pipes up in her head. _Shut up, BJ, I’m not in the mood for puns._ ) She’s not just spiraling; she’s distracting herself on purpose because she’s scared, so she forces herself to focus, and to notice the way Helen’s looking at her, the way her eyes are shining and she can feel her hand trembling on her forearm.

“Well, I’ll be,” Helen breathes.

“Yeah.”

“You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you, Major?”

“I guess I am.”

“Good thing I like a girl who keeps me on my toes,” Helen says before relaxing into a comfortable smile. She leans down and kisses Margaret again, just like before, lasting a million years yet over in a flash, and then she leaves, leaving Margaret half wondering if she imagined the whole thing.

“Yeah,” she says to nobody but the night sky. “Me, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “live at the thermidor” is supposed to be a reference to the troubadour bar/theater/concert venue but it didn’t open until 1957… as i've said before, timeline schmimeline
> 
> Up next: the secret father mulcahy chapter that I didn’t realize was important until the other night when I was reviewing my outline
> 
> Also, I do my mashposting @crickelwood on Tumblr if you want to say hi!


	5. Father Mulcahy and the Pierce-Hunnicutt Happiness Machine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> chapter 5 aka i know nothing about catholicism but i heard confession is a thing

After Helen leaves Margaret doesn’t know what to do with herself, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself when she doesn’t know what to do with herself. It’s an entirely new feeling for her. She feels a great emptiness opening up within her, all this space, all this room, that she didn’t even know she had until Helen was filling it.

She used to think the army filled her up, but now she thinks it was only scratching the surface. (You know she never wanted to be a nurse? She wanted to join up and it was the only way she could. That doesn’t mean she hasn’t come to love it. You can find the right thing in the wrong place, even Pierce and Hunnicutt would have to admit that.) She drinks alone in her tent, which can’t be healthy. She doesn’t want to write in her diary because she doesn’t want to have those entries in there to reread one day. Even in the one place she’s not supposed to think of an audience, she can’t help herself, and she can’t stand even to disappoint future-Margaret.

So she wallows. She works her nurses very hard indeed, since that’s what happens when she dives headfirst into her work. She snaps at Pierce in O.R. and even he seems to sense that it’s no use snapping back, so he doesn’t. After Margaret mentally exhausts all other options she finally brings herself to ask _what do other people, normal people, do here when they’re having a problem?_ Plenty of them go to Hawkeye, of course, though that’s usually if they’re having a problem with the army side of things. People go to Potter if it’s a professional matter, which this isn’t. No. If people on this camp, any camp in fact, are having a personal problem, they go to the chaplain.

Margaret’s not a Catholic, though she supposes her Irish family must have been at some point, and she does believe in God at least intellectually if not with her whole heart. And Father Mulcahy certainly means well, very well, even if sometimes she finds him a little… ineffectual. She decides to try it, letting a wall come down instead of simply putting up another one like she usually does when something starts to upset her.

She hesitates, but only for a split second, before knocking on the door of Father Mulcahy’s tent.

“Come in! Oh! Major Houlihan. Are you all right?” the chaplain asks brightly, gently, and pulling up a chair all at the same time.

Margaret stares at him stonily. “It’s a small camp, Father. You don’t have to act ignorant.”

He smiles, looking down. “I never like to assume, Major.”

“No,” she says, and sits. She already feels bad for being cold and wants to put him at ease. Then she freezes up all over again thinking how she doesn’t want to change herself for any man, even one who definitely has no indecent intentions toward her, and crosses her arms over her chest.

“What’s troubling you?” he asks. Margaret feels very sour all of a sudden.

“My best friend lied to me about being an alcoholic. And now she’s gone. How would that make you feel?”

She sits back in her chair and feels an urge to spread out somehow, to put her feet up. She pictures Hawkeye and his inability to be in space without sprawling, the way his manner of sitting is like a physical representation of the ways he otherwise doesn’t fit in. Her muscles tighten. She crosses one leg over the other.

“Why don’t we take those one at a time,” the chaplain says. He’s so kind it’s almost patronizing, though she supposes that’s his job. He is the “father,” after all.

“Really I just wanted to borrow a book,” she improvises out of nowhere. Mulcahy takes her at her word.

“Oh? Anything in particular?”

“Um. Whatever you have lying around ought to do.”

“Major. Margaret,” he says, leaning forward. “Why don’t we talk about what’s bothering you, and then maybe I’ll be able to suggest something.”

She steadies herself with a breath. “Yes. That sounds fair.”

The chaplain mirrors her breathing. “All right. Let’s start from the beginning. It’s probably healthy that you can both admit now that Helen is an–”

“She lied to me!” she interrupts and finds herself standing. "I thought she was telling me everything and she lied to me! I’m the one who knew her best, I’m the one who’s supposed to be able to tell when she’s fine.”

“Major, she was lying to everyone. Possibly even herself.”

“But I should have been able to tell! I’m the one who should have been able to tell.” She’s pacing around her chair talking over and past him.

“Major, I’m sorry, but that’s just not true,” Mulcahy says. “Yes, we all think there are people who we know better than ourselves, but do you truly believe that’s possible?”

“Well, I–”

“To know what it’s like to be inside the head of another?”

“Well, no, but that’s not what I’m saying! I don’t think I knew her better than she knows herself, at least, I don’t think that’s what I think. But there are ways that I was responsible for her! I won’t let up, I should have been able to tell. That’s what I’m worried about.” She sits back down.

“I suppose we’ll have to disagree, then,” Mulcahy says too cheerfully. “But I don’t think that’s taking responsibility. I think that’s taking blame.”

“What?”

“Ask yourself, is this line of thinking making you feel bad for Helen, or for yourself? And once you answer that, ask yourself who’s really suffering here? Who deserves them both, the responsibility and the sympathy that follows?”

“You’re saying it’s her problem, so it’s her problem?”

“I’m saying no one should be beating themself up about it, least of all you. You did everything you could to help her, when it became clear that that’s what she needed. I’m quite confident that’s all any of us can do.”

The two of them sit quietly for a minute with that in the air. It’s a comfortable silence, not pregnant with cynicism or unspat barbs like it is with Pierce, or ridden with subtext that she’s sure she’s missing like when she talks with Hunnicutt. It’s even better than the stoic and meaningful silences shared over a drink with Potter once in a blue moon. It’s one of the more peaceful moments she’s experienced in the past few years, there in the chaplain’s tent.

“It’s more self-pity I’m left with, then,” she finally says.

“How’s that?” Kind, so kind. Even kinder still than before, and worst of all, he means it.

“The best thing for her was to leave, and obviously I want the best thing for her. But that means she’s gone. It means she left me alone.” She basically has to stop herself from stomping her feet and wailing _and it’s not fair!_ It’s not fair how the two things they need are mutually exclusive, how Helen needs help she can only get elsewhere and Margaret needs help she can only get from Helen. For the first time she feels stuck there the way Pierce and Hunnicutt do.

“I won’t deny that it’s one of the hardest things to do in this world, to say goodbye to a friend, especially one you thought you had a lot longer with.”

Margaret doesn’t correct him, doesn’t remind him that Helen’s orders had come in already and she was soon to be homeward bound regardless. She supposes it doesn’t make too much of a difference; if you can’t help from picturing the whole future with them it doesn’t matter if you know it’s going to end far before then. Suddenly in her mind’s eye she sees Pierce wearing an expression halfway between terror and rage and dripping cold water onto paperwork on a desk that had been Blake’s, and then Frank’s, and now Potter’s, all but begging them to go and see off McIntyre at the airbase. They hadn’t let him, but he’d gone anyway, of course. She thanks God silently that he did, which feels appropriate given where she’s sitting.

“But what do I do now that she’s gone? I’ve never– I’ve never felt quite this way before. I can’t– it’s not just something I can ignore.” As soon as the words are out of her mouth she feels like they were a revelation, an epiphany, an ascension. She feels ten pounds lighter simply for acknowledging that she has a problem that won’t just go away if she looks away for long enough. Mulcahy smiles warmly like he can tell she’s thinking big important thoughts, and he’s proud of her.

“Just saying that that’s how you feel is an important first step,” he says. “You know, it can be dangerous, or precarious, rather, to lay all your hopes, your wellbeing in the hands of just one other person. And that’s not to say anyone can be wholly responsible for their own wellbeing, just that, well, you know, it takes a village, as they say.”

“To raise a child, Father, not to console a nurse.”

“No, no,” he concedes. “But what I mean to say is, not only shouldn’t Helen be the only person on planet earth that you can confide in, but I’m sure she’s not! I’m here, for a start, and there are certainly others on this camp with ears just as willing as mine to be chewed.”

Margaret looks at the scuffed tips of her boots; she’d been too down and distracted to shine them this week. She considers just how long it took her to even think about going to see the chaplain, and she’d hardly consider him a friend. He’s more like a brother than a father, a cousin who hangs around and who you turns to when all of your other options are well and truly dried up.

“But–!” Mulcahy goes on energetically, seeming to sense her uncertainty about his last statement. “I promised you a book.”

“Yes.” She relaxes back into her body, the onus of conversation finally off of her. Besides, his advice has been good enough thus far that she’s actually thinking about possibly reading whatever he gives her.

“Have you ever read Virginia Woolf?” he asks. _Wasn’t she a lesbian_? she thinks as she shakes her head. She thought she’d been hiding well enough from the world. (She’d certainly been hiding well enough from herself.) Then again, the good chaplain can be notoriously out of touch when it comes to anything so blasphemous as that.

“I’ve got a book that’s more of a glorified essay,” the Father goes on, rising to examine his bookshelf. “ _A Room of One’s Own_ , it’s called, I think you might get something out of it. You know,” he says as he scans the rows, evidently not finding it where he thought it would be, “often times I’m reminded of Woolf, in her more vital moments, by you, Margaret, uh…” he trails off, distracted, and the silence for the first time becomes slightly awkward when they both seem to remember how she died.

“Ah!” Mulcahy recovers. “I believe I lent it to Hawkeye some months ago. I’m sure he’s finished with it by now and would be happy to pass it along to you. I’m sure,” he adds deliberately, “that all you have to do is ask.”

Hawkeye. Naturally. Maybe it’s for the best, since he might be the only person on camp who’s remotely capable of understanding precisely how she’s feeling, and even he won’t really get it. She thanks Mulcahy and walks across the compound to the Swamp in a daze and a haze of her own thoughts and propositions.

Sometimes Margaret thinks she’s changed. Sometimes she thinks everyone else has. Sometimes she thinks things are different now than when she was younger, and sometimes she thinks this is how it’s always been, she just couldn’t tell before. She reads her old diary entries and is almost disgusted by the way she found joy in being here, at having people under her, at having things running smoothly under her orders. She reads herself complaining about the way Pierce constantly ragged on the war and doesn’t recognize the woman from those pages. She’s so much more like him now, which scares her, too. People don’t really want to be like Hawkeye. They need him, and they like him, sure, but they think there should only be one.

She knocks on the door of the Swamp.

“Come in!”

Pierce is alone in there, sitting on his bed with a blanket wrapped around him, in the midst of writing a letter from within that cocoon.

“One second,” he says, finishing up a clause or a sentence before he looks up. “Oh, Margaret. Is everything okay?”

“Oh, uh, I can come back later, if you’re busy.”

“No, no, it’s just my dad, he can wait– wait, you actually came in here looking for me? And it’s not some kind of medical emergency? Never in my wildest dreams did I think–“

“Pierce! I only– I went to Father Mulcahy to borrow a book, but he said he’d lent it to you. I’d like to borrow _A Room of One’s Own,_ please,” she says, each word feeling clipped and stilted. He stares at her for a second, clearly trying to figure out what the hell is going on before he visibly decides that he doesn’t care.

“Uh-huh.” He shrugs off the blanket and starts scouring his cubby and shelf, and when he can’t find it there he casually climbs over Hunnicutt’s cot to look for his over there.

“I love the way she can put you anywhere,” he says as he searches, “just with her words. Nobody else have I read and so felt like I’m looking at the world through their eyes, and not just getting their perspective but like, actually _seeing_ it, you know what I mean? Ah! Bingo,” he says as he finds it on a shelf by the still. He hesitates before giving it to her, though, as he looks at the cover and fans through the pages, one foot still among Hunnicutt’s sheets, the other on the floor toward her. Sprawled, like always, like he’s afraid people are going to forget about him if he isn’t taking up as much space as possible. He appears to linger on one line or another.

“Hawkeye?”

“Yeah. Sorry. You, um… You doing okay, Major?” There’s a pink tinge across his cheeks and nose like he’s… embarrassed? Maybe it’s just the cold.

“Of course I am,” she says, though she knows she doesn’t sound convincing. “Why?” she allows herself to ask. It’s the closest she can come right now to admitting to him that she’s not.

“Well, I just– I thought that maybe– let’s just say you haven’t really been yourself since Captain– since Helen went home and I– I wanted to let you know that I’m here for you if you, you know, if you need anything or if you want to talk and that I won’t, you know, that anything you say is–”

“Thank you, Captain,” she says, her voice soft to keep it from shaking. She holds out her arm and he walks over to place the book in her outstretched hand. She lets their fingers touch as she takes it from him; his feel practically frozen. He swallows.

“It’s really not fair,” he says, his expression suddenly dark, his face looking hollow and gaunt where a minute ago it had been almost rosy, “what this place’ll do to you. To the people you– you trust the most. The people you’re closest to.”

“No,” she says. “It’s not.”

“It takes them away,” he goes on. “One way or another.”

She used to think they were alike for both putting up walls, veneers of harshness and cynicism that got cracked and worn down from working here so long. She thinks now that maybe she was wrong about that. That maybe his veneer isn’t a veneer after all, that actually he’s just kind of like that, bitter and sarcastic but also sensitive and emotional at the same time, and that if he’s ever got a brave face on it’s not that he’s trying to put it on for anybody else; it’s just that he’s kind of brave. Which means it’s not his veneer that gets worn down, it’s him.

She thanks him again for the book, and goes back to her tent where she lives alone, and reads.

Margaret likes BJ, but for some reason she finds herself talking with Hawkeye more often. When they talk, more gets said. She’d been so quick to hate him, he so got under her skin from the moment they met, partly because he always reminded her of ways she used to be. The way she used to allow herself to question why things were the way they were, and to bend rules that maybe weren’t strictly speaking necessary. Pierce bends all sorts of rules.

Sometimes Margaret pays attention to the dynamic when the three of them are in a room together, her and Pierce and Hunnicutt. What it is mostly is fun. What a fucking concept.

A week after she reads all of _A Room of One’s Own_ in one sitting and doesn’t return it to Father Mulcahy either, she finds herself at some kind of impromptu soiree in the Swamp after the movie ends. She likes drinking with them because they’re silly and they don’t get handsy, except with each other when they think people will take it for casual contact. She recalls another night in the Swamp, shrieking with laughter while Pierce sang drinking songs and McIntyre noodled on his ukulele.

“Do you remember,” she says, frantically patting Pierce’s knee, “when Frank tried to ban alcohol?”

Pierce thinks back then practically howls when he does remember. “Margaret, I haven’t thought about that in years! And then Father Mulcahy– Beej, you’re not gonna believe this– Father Mulcahy got so nervous before his sermon that he showed up completely sauced!”

“No kidding,” Hunnicutt says, his eyes unconvincing behind his smile.

“Yeah,” Hawkeye confirms. “Klinger gave him a nip of you know, sacramental wine before he went on, but I guess he overdid it a little.”

“Well, he was drinking for three,” Margaret says. “The father, the son, and the holy red-nosed!”

Pierce cackles and Hunnicutt is startled enough to be impressed as he lets out a disbelieving laugh at her joke. Pierce is so tickled, apparently, that he loses his balance and ends up leaning his whole weight onto Hunnicutt. He only lingers there for a moment, as long as he thinks he can steal away, before sitting back up.

“You know, that reminds me,” Pierce says as he rights himself. “The one time I ever went to a Latin mass in a real church was with my friend from high school– it was the condition on which her father would take us to see _Broadway Melody_ afterward– I got so confused by the idea of transubstantiation that I tried to convince her to sneak us back in on the way home so I could get a good look at what I thought was supposed to be blood–!”

“Jesus Christ, Pierce.”

“Well, precisely. Anyway I was so dead set on going back to see it and wouldn’t let up and we argued about it for hours like even after we’d already made it back till eventually she had to admit that it must just be a metaphor…” Pierce looks distracted, like he can’t quite remember why he started telling that story.

“Always been a heartbreaker, I see,” BJ says. Pierce smiles in a show of being flattered.

“Well. I guess I figured I’d rather deal in real blood than in wine, if it comes down to that.”

“Real blood and bathtub gin,” BJ says, offering each of them another round. Margaret nods in acceptance and holds out her glass.

“How about you, Hunnicutt?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Pierce says, looking conspiratorial. “When did you decide to become a man of the cloth mask?”

BJ smiles and leans back, resting his arm on the back of his chair so his fingers hang and just graze Pierce’s shoulder.

“Dad wanted me to join in the family business, be a lawyer,” BJ says. “Went in to medicine just to spite him.”

Pierce starts to smile but catches himself for some reason.

“I thought you came from three generations of doctors,” he says. “I swear that’s what you told me…”

“Did I?” Hunnicutt asks innocently. “Why would I say that?”

Pierce manages to furrow his brow and shrug it off at the same time.

“Okay, Margaret, your turn,” he says.

She thinks back, remembering her first time inside a real hospital. She hadn’t cried when she’d sprained her wrist and she’d told everyone around her it wasn’t bothering her at all, which is why by the time they realized something was really wrong it was worse than the base doctors could handle. She remembers the nurses’ crisp white uniforms and the delicate way the doctors had treated her, like she was a small bird with hollow bones and not a twelve-year-old girl so brave she hadn’t even complained when her arm turned black and blue and started to swell up like a balloon.

“My mother was a nurse,” she says instead. “An army nurse. I spent my whole life knowing that was the plan for me, basically, that it was my in to join up. It wasn’t really until I was already at Seton Hall that I started to love it–”

“You were at Seton Hall?” Pierce’s ears prick up. “That can’t be more than forty-five minutes from the city! Margaret, half my Barnard friends went to nursing school there! How come you never said before?”

The thing of it is, she doesn’t even know. It just never really occurred to her that they could have met. The simple fact that they intensely despised each other from the moment they met made Margaret discount out of hand the possibility that they might have been friends had they known each other as students.

Besides, “I don’t know, we never used to go in to New York! You know what we did do,” she says, poking Pierce on the arm because she knows he’s going to like this, “we all used to crowd into Wally Crichton’s Nash and drive to Palisades Park and scream our heads off on all the rides like we were a bunch of kids.”

Pierce indeed loses his mind laughing at that, and she joins him at the memory of the half dozen of them waiting in line for roller coasters surrounded only by young families and feeling like they were never going to grow old.

“No kidding!” Pierce says. “We used to do the same thing! I mean, not really, it was the B train and Coney Island but still. It was like– it didn’t really feel like it back then but it was like we just did whatever we wanted, all the time.” He massages his temple. “I can’t remember the last time I felt like that. We used to act on every impulse, you know? I guess that’s why I get so crazy here. It’s not like I don’t get impulses–”

“I’ll say,” Margaret interjects. Hunnicutt commiserates with a smile.

“But there’s no outlet here, no place for spontaneity. One time,” Pierce goes on, as if to illustrate his point, “my friends and I took the train all the way down to Annapolis for a weekend just because we had a roommate who’d never eaten crab before.”

“It’ll do, in a pinch,” Hunnicutt says. Pierce grins at the horrible joke. “I guess we’re lucky you two didn’t meet back then. By the sounds of things you never would’ve graduated.”

“Hey, that goes double for you, Beej.” Pierce snorts a laugh. “I think if we’d met when we were kids my dad would’ve had to scare you away with a shotgun.”

Hunnicutt smiles, looking just this side of flattered since he’s gotten Hawkeye back on his side real fast. Margaret doesn’t even mind because there aren’t really _sides_ , and besides, the fact that they love each other so much makes the whole thing more fun. They settle into a silence that’s a little familiar and a little sad.

Suddenly, “Party games!” Pierce invokes. “This is a party, I insist we play party games.”

“This is a party? There’s three people here,” Hunnicutt says.

“Three’s a crowd, BJ Hunnicutt,” Hawkeye says. “And every day is a holiday in Korea.” He smiles, satisfied with that pathetic explanation. Margaret is overcome with uncontrollable laughter at the sight of them.

“I haven’t played party games since I was in college!” she says once she’s not doubled over anymore.

“Then it’s the perfect night for it!” Pierce says. “We just discovered we were practically in the same cohort.”

“And you do always say our humor is sophomoric,” Hunnicutt chimes in.

Margaret rolls her eyes. “Do I? Sounds more like something Winchester would say.”

Hunnicutt shrugs.

“That settles it!” Pierce exclaims. “One standard issue game of ‘Never Have I Ever,’ and then you’re free to go, but only if I learn something really juicy about each of you first. I’ll start,” he says cheerily, like he just won a contest. He really is such a child. He’s lucky that it’s occasionally charming. And maybe he’s right that this place could sometimes use a little cheering up.

“You do that, Pierce,” Margaret says. Her tongue feels loose in her mouth and her cheeks are warm in a good way. She still doesn’t have many friends, but she has this, some nights.

Pierce adjusts his posture and sits up straight for what must be the first time in his life as if he’s going to make some kind of big important proclamation. In his mind he probably is.

“Never have I ever… never _did_ I ever, rather, go a whole year in school without getting detention.”

Margaret goes to drink since she never got it even once, but BJ stops her.

“What, since kindergarten?”

Hawkeye waves him off. “Fine. Starting in junior high,” he amends. She and BJ both drink. “Coupla goody-two-shoes, huh?”

“Guess so,” Margaret says, but Pierce is looking past her at BJ.

“I guess they’d have to be, if they’re that conspicuous,” he says re: the size of Hunnicutt’s shoes, presumably.

“Ha ha,” BJ says. “Your turn, Margaret.”

Suddenly her mind goes blank. What has she ever done? What hasn’t she done? Should she lie? What would be the point of that? She can’t even do the freebie, ‘never have I ever kissed a girl,’ as if either of the two of them would know it wasn’t true. And now it’s been too long and she still doesn’t have one and this is just like when she was a kid and could never do anything right and–

“Never have I ever gone to medical school!” she blurts out.

“Margaret,” Pierce whines, “you’re supposed to say stuff where we don’t already know! Who’s done it and who hasn’t.”

“Take it easy, Hawk, it’s only the first round,” BJ says, coming to her rescue, and lifting his glass toward Pierce in a toast. “I’ll drink to that, anyway.”

They drink. BJ waits for Hawkeye to tell him it’s his turn before he talks again.

“Never have I ever,” Hunnicutt starts, tapping his bottom lip as he thinks, “had a… rendezvous in the back of a jeep.”

Margaret barks a laugh and drinks unselfconsciously; Pierce will vouch for her getting caught like that with Frank any number of times. Pierce drinks too, the lech, and she follows Hunnicutt’s eye line to his Adam’s apple and watches him swallow.

“I hope you had fun,” BJ says almost innocently.

“Hey,” Pierce says. “I don’t kiss and tell.”

Margaret scoffs. “No, you kiss and shout it from the mountaintops.”

The night goes on and in a funny way they learn a little bit about each other. (Hunnicutt had never seen snow till he came to Korea, for instance, and Pierce has never had a cavity. Neither she nor BJ have ever smoked a cigarette and neither she nor Hawkeye had ever left the States until the war.) They’re all getting tired; Hunnicutt in particular looks moments away from dropping off. Pierce nudges him with his foot.

“Your turn, big fella.”

“Hrmph,” BJ says. “Never have I ever slept with Hawkeye.”

Now. For some time Margaret has been wondering if BJ is for some reason jealous over her and Pierce, and this has sealed the deal for her. Of course, that’s stupid, considering how obviously whipped he has Hawkeye. But never mind that, what right does Hunnicutt even have to be jealous over him? He’s a happily married man, so much and so deliberately defined as such that he practically has it tattooed on his forehead. (That must drive Hawkeye crazy, the way BJ acts even though he must have no intention of making good on it.)

Margaret nearly chokes on her drink from laughing at Pierce’s wide eyes.

“Oh, come on, everyone does! Sleeping with you is like a non-event,” she says.

“Ouch,” Pierce says, looking genuinely taken aback. “Don’t listen to her, Beej, it’s not as bad as that.”

Hunnicutt just does his quiet, funny little laugh while Pierce plays or doesn’t play at being hurt. When she looks back to him, BJ is asleep, no doubt dreaming of his backseat hookup with Pierce.

Hawkeye looks at BJ, the most average man on the planet, like he just plucked the moon out of the sky for him. She watches him watch him sleep and she thinks he might really be in deep. Like _deep_ , deep, the kind of deep maybe only Hawkeye Pierce can be over someone or something. It almost makes her heart ache watching him, watching him know he doesn’t have a chance and be in deep anyway because that’s what he does; he doesn’t shove things down, he doesn’t lie to himself. Not on purpose, anyway. Not when he can help it.

You know when a college party dies down and there’s nothing left to do except for you and your best friend who is the only other one left awake to go quietly to your bedroom and lie next to each other above the covers? It feels like that’s the only thing to do, so they do the closest thing and sit side by side on Pierce’s bunk after he’s draped a blanket over BJ. Margaret leans her head on Pierce’s shoulder and he leans his head on hers and she even takes his hand and interlinks their fingers. He’s not jagged, or rough around the edges, really. He’s soft. So, so soft, actually. She’s the hard one. They look silently at the sleeping Hunnicutt because it’s all there is to do until she begins the whispered conversation of a sleepover.

“You know,” she says, “I used to want what you at McIntyre had.”

“Hm.” His fingers tense between hers.

“But now I want what you and BJ have.” She hopes that will comfort him, that even if it’s not everything it’s still special.

“Is it that obvious?” he says back softly. Everything is soft this evening. 

“Are you trying not to be?”

“Hm,” he just says again. He’s acting perfectly calm but she can feel his pulse racing in his wrist. “I don’t know.”

For the first time she feels bad about knowing. About how he feels. About how he is. Because he never told her, not really. She caught him and McIntyre and never told a soul so she’s the only one who really knows what she’s hearing when Pierce talks about BJ the way someone does about their lover. Another part of her thinks that must be how he wants it, that that’s why he acts the way he does. That he wants to not have to say, to have these things just be understood. To have it be normal, the way everybody else gets to be. At least Margaret knows if she’s different then she’s going to be different; Pierce thinks if he works hard enough everyone else will realize they’re the crazy ones, not him. That’s rough, but… she remembers him telling her it’s her own fault if she hates it here, since she signed up for it. She guesses everybody makes their own bed sometimes. 

“Hey. You doing okay?” she asks him. It’s funny for her to be the one asking him that. Besides the fact that either he’s always okay or he’s never okay, so it’s funny to ask in the first place. Instead of answering he retrieves a crumpled brown paper bag from under his cot and hands it to her.

“Eugh!” she says. He snatches it back and uncrumples it so she can see there’s a message written on it in black felt tip. “‘An affair is an affair is an affair,’” she reads out loud.

“Why the hell would he say that?” he whispers, anguished, and puts his head in his hands.

Margaret furrows her brow. “Wha– what does this even mean? What is this?”

“He brought that to me today. He brought me a ham sandwich from the mess tent while I was stuck in post-op and he wrote that on the bag. What the hell is he trying to do to me?”

Margaret wonders to high heaven if he thinks BJ knows. She thinks BJ must, since he’s supposed to be smart, but she also knows Hunnicutt can have a hell of a blind spot when he wants to, especially when it comes to Pierce. When she still doesn’t answer he keeps talking.

“I didn’t even remember saying it. Apparently I said Gertrude Stein wrote that, to Alice B. Toklas, just like that.”

Wow. Her eyebrows shoot up purely involuntarily.

“Well… he probably knows you like Gertrude Stein,” she suggests.

“Yeah. He knows I ‘like’ ‘Gertrude Stein,’” he says, adding the air quotes for emphasis. “Seriously, what does he think he’s doing here?”

“He’s trying to be nice! He probably thinks it’s funny.” He probably does, since she reallydoesn’t think Hunnicutt is flirting with him on purpose, even though that’s what he’s definitely ended up doing. He must just not know how seriously Pierce would take it if it were serious. At the very least he isn’t actually trying to leave his family.

“Well, it’s not,” Pierce says. “It’s not fucking funny.”

“Pierce! You can’t let this– this– this _man_ get to you like this! You’re better than that! We’re all better than that, than some emotional punching bag, some Raggedy-Ann doll.”

“Oh, yeah?” he says, and it’s basically pathetic. Pathetic, and like a punch in the gut, because she can hear herself all the times she’s said it didn’t matter how she felt since she could take it, whatever it was.

“Yes,” she says, looking straight into his eyes. “Do not let him mess with you.”

His eyes darken and he looks down, like he’s really considering it.

“He’ll always mess with me,” he says. “I think it’s how we’re built.”

“Pierce,” she sighs, a little disappointed. She doesn’t let herself think about it for too long, she just leans over and kisses him once, close-mouthed, just to show him he’s worth something, goddamnit. “Why didn’t you say something before, when we talked about the future?” She’s blind to the reality for a second thinking only of the fact that she could have helped him. (Now _that_ sounds like a way someone might describe Hawkeye.)

He finally stops looking so angry, or sad, or some emotion she’s never felt before and huffs a small and bitter laugh.

“What kind of question is that?”

“Like that would bother you,” she justifies. “You’re so… you know.”

“I mean, sure, but it’s not like I have a death wish.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” she says before she knows she’s going to say it. He takes it like it’s an old blow, one he’s been dealt many times.

“Oy, Margaret,” he says. “Why do you even care so much?”

She sets her jaw. She wants to tell him why should it matter why she cares? Isn’t she allowed to care about people? But she also thinks what a good friend might do in this situation is show a little goddamn solidarity. She’s always played her hand close to her chest, and look where that’s gotten her. How happy has that ever made her? The happiest she’s ever been was the few months she threw all caution to the wind with Helen. Well, now Pierce is giving her a second shot at that kind of abandon.

“I was in love Helen,” she says evenly, peacefully even, like it’s a mantra that brings her spiritual calm. It is, in a way. “I– I am in love with Helen.”

“Oh,” he says.

“You’re in love with BJ, I’m in love with Helen.”

“That’s one way to put it,” he says, a familiar smile creeping across his face. “All those times you called me a degenerate, huh? Immoral, Gracie? An abomination, Gracie?”

“Shut up!” she says, lightly shoving his chest and stifling laughter. “It’s hard– you know it’s hard to know, to understand… I hope I didn’t–I hope I didn’t hurt you too much.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, and squeezes her shoulder. It’s not exactly the response she was hoping for, but she also doesn’t blame him. They let the truth sit out in the open for a minute. It’s a dangerous conversation they’re having, but she’d rather it be with him than anyone else.

“Can we lie down?” he says after another moment. “I’m exhausted. Jesus, I feel like I just ran a marathon.”

“Yeah, okay,” she says. She nods and tries to smile but he’s not, so she can’t. 

They both lie down in his cot, cramped and crooked, but she feels warm against the soft cloth of his robe. She has to lie mostly on top of him for them both to fit, with her leg across his and her head on his chest. He holds her with both arms so she doesn’t fall off into the space between his bed and short cubby.

“You know that Peg can’t cook?” he says.

“No,” she says. “I didn’t.”

“I go insane whenever he mentions that. I can cook, you know. I’d be–” he emits a sharp bark of hysterical laughter before shutting himself up. “I’d be a better wife than his wife! Ha! Isn’t that nuts to think? I– I’ve never said anything like that… out loud before.”

“Don’t stop,” she says. “Tell me about him. Talk.”

She feels him swallow.

“So what?” he says. “So what if I imagine waking up next to him every morning and watching him sleep for a few quiet moments before fixing us both cups of coffee so he wakes up to the smell. So what, you know?”

“Hawkeye,” she whispers, meaning to tell him how sorry she is, but he doesn’t hear her. She settles back down and listens to the sound of their breathing together.

Hearing him talk like that, she thinks how it sounds just like the life she used to want, the life she was so close to having, the life she would’ve had if she hadn’t gotten a divorce, and she thinks… it’s not that she doesn’t want love, but maybe she just doesn’t want it in the way everyone else does. She loves Helen, and she loves spending time with her, but she doesn’t think she needs to be married to her. (Part of her is thankful for that, seeing as it’s out of the question.) But Pierce… he wants that in a way she never would have guessed in a million years. He wants it and for some stupid, arbitrary, meaningless reason he can’t have it, and that’s before you even get to the fact that he wants it with Hunnicutt. But it turns out he was right all along; he’s not different, not really. Not in the ways that count.

“I used to have these roommates,” he says, “A couple. The couple– they’re who I left my cat with when I– anyway. Every day after dinner I’d see them– I’d have cooked, you know, or at least picked something up if I was too busy at work– they both worked, too, you know, Jack was an orderly at the hospital and Olive was a teacher in town– anyway. Every day after dinner Olive would wash the dishes and Jack would dry them and I’d sit at the table cracking jokes and thinking ‘Huh. I’ll never have that.’”

“Pierce–”

“Because in some real sense, some meaningful sense, I’ll never have that, because even if– I mean, I don’t know what it would have been like if things had gone differently with Carlye, it’s just– They looked so– There was something so peaceful about it. It’s peace I was never gonna know, I guess. Ha. What the hell did I know from war back then?”

She grabs a fistful of his shirt and lets it go.

“But what would they have done? Without you, I mean.”

“What?”

“It sounds like you brought them something. Balance, maybe.”

“Excuse me?”

“You cooked,” she says, because it feels simple to her. It’s confusing how much trouble he has imagining a future for himself, even a lopsided one.

“I– I’m sure they would have worked something out,” he says. “They must’ve. In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t live with them anymore.”

Margaret shrugs against him.

“You’re okay, Pierce, you know that?” She looks up at him, he looks down at her. “You’re good to have around. I– I like having you around.”

“No kidding,” he says.

“Yeah, well,” she says. “Don’t get used to it.”

“No, Margaret. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“Hm.”

He lifts one hand to stroke the back of her head. As far as arms to fall asleep in, his are all right.

“Hey, Margaret,” he says as she’s beginning to drift off.

“Yeah?”

“You’re okay, you know. I like having you around, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> up next: hawkeye and margaret discuss fate, free will, gender roles, and macbeth, and charles might finally get a cameo


	6. Pierce, Part II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 6 aka the feeling was friendship

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cw: a brief instance of sexual harassment

That night in Tokyo, Pierce looks almost exactly like a real person.

Margaret hadn’t even had R&R until Hunnicutt had given her his pass since his patient went into shock two hours before he and Pierce were supposed to leave for their big romantic weekend or whatever and he’d hurriedly shoved it into her hands on the way into the O.R. along with his theater ticket for that night. She’d held it out through the door of the Swamp like a white flag when she’d had to break the news to Pierce, and while he looked disappointed he hadn’t seemed like he wished death upon her or anything.

So that evening she’d sat through a sushi dinner Pierce couldn’t afford to pay for that she’d had to split with him and then two hours of unintelligible Shakespeare and now they’re strolling along the Ginza under natural and artificial light thinking how it’s practically a date but of course it’s not. When she’d gotten bored of not knowing what the hell was going on during the play, she’d watched him be enraptured for the both of them. He’d sat with one leg crossed over the other, his foot dangling out into the aisle, and leant forward on his knees whenever the drama heightened. He clapped earnestly at the intermission and at the end, and especially fervently for the pit orchestra and the lighting and sound crews when they were acknowledged. So he is capable of showing respect for one institution or another, just not the ones she thinks are important.

It’s a warm night, so when they leave the theater he loosens his tie and slings his Class A jacket over his shoulder and looks just remarkably real. He’s got an odd look about him, eyes that play between blue and gray, hair that pretends to be black, and a nose that can’t decide what shape it wants to be in the slightest, but there’s something in the way he carries himself, like he knows all that and thinks it’s great, that makes him approach handsome. She thinks it might break her brain if she saw him in civvies; the inherent put-together-ness of his dress uniform combined with the casual way he wears it like any other suit is already jarring enough. She’s been in the service so long she’s starting to worry there are some things about her that might never go back to normal.

“Isn’t that brilliant?” he’s saying, half to her and half to anyone that’ll listen. “The way you don’t even know the language and yet the story totally transcends that? Not only did I never think I’d see _Macbeth_ in Japanese, I certainly never thought I’d enjoy it even more than in English!”

“You understood what was going on?”

He shrugs. “I mean, I guess it helps to have read it… Of course, I couldn’t stop thinking about Dr. Newsom– last I checked Sidney told me he was going back to Chicago– wait, have you never read _Macbeth_? Or seen it or anything?” She shakes her head. “My God, woman, how do you live? ‘Out, out, damn spot?’ Nothing? That’s– if you ever hear me say that in the scrub room that’s what she says when she– you know what, don’t worry about it. I don’t want to ruin it for you for when you do get to read it. As a matter of fact, come this way,” he leads her around he corner. He’s absolutely mad with power.

“And where, pray tell, are you taking me, Captain?”

“Fife,” he says. “And drums,” he mutters.

“What?”

“There’s an English language bookshop down this way that stays open late, I’m buying you a copy and I want five pages on Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness on my desk by Monday.”

“Are you sure you were pre-med? Sounds like you were an English major.”

“I contain multitudes,” he says, opening the shop door for her. “And if BJ were here,” Pierce goes on, quieter now that they’re inside, “he’d say ‘there was an English major in the hospital yesterday, and I liked him a lot better than the French lieutenant.’”

Margaret rolls her eyes, even though really she thinks it’s sweet. The mood is just right for a joke like that. Pierce should feel lucky; nine times out of ten when he jokes the mood is all wrong.

“That’s terrible,” she says. “I guess we should be glad he’s not here.”

Pierce laughs under his breath while he scans for something like a Drama section. While he goes off looking for her play, she traipses serenely through the stacks picking up and leafing through anything that remotely strikes her fancy before delicately sliding it back into place. After a while he comes up next to her and taps her on the shoulder with a book.

“Found it,” he says, and tries to hand it to her.

“I thought it was your treat.”

“It is! Doesn’t mean you can’t have a flick through while we’re here.”

She fixes him with a pointed stare. “It’s okay. I trust you.”

His eyebrows go up. “That’s a new one on me.”

“Just hold on to it for me, will you? I _am_ browsing.”

“Uh-huh,” he says, and joins her in the fiction section. Soon he’s transfixed by their stock as well, and takes one or two to buy for himself. He hums quietly while he traces titles on spines.

“You ever think about destiny, Margaret?” he says out of nowhere.

“What?”

“You ever think about destiny? Fate, you know, predetermination?”

“I… I think you look good in your uniform.”

He smiles and shakes his head. “I wish you hadn’t said that.”

“No, I don’t think about destiny,” she says. A beat passes. “What are you talking about?”

“You know, where we’re meant to be! If we get to choose what happens to us!” he says, growing more animated as he talks. A couple across the shop turns to glare at him to be quiet but either he doesn’t see or he ignores them. “Do you ever think about the people you couldn’t live without? Were you destined to meet them? If you were then how come you can’t keep them forever? Or is that destiny, too?”

“Pierce! Have you lost your mind?” He doesn’t answer. “I– there’s no such thing as destiny, okay? If there were, what would be the point?” We have to be able to choose our own path in life. If not, then she’s never getting out of here.

“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere,” he says with more than a hint of mania. She can tell despite the distance between them that his pupils are dilated. “If there’s no destiny, then there must be free will, right?”

“Sure.”

“Then how come I haven’t made one decision of my own in the past three years?”

“What?”

“Margaret, I’m trapped! We all are! Or– I guess it depends.”

“Wha– On what?”

“On whether you’re trapped, too.”

“On whether I’m–?”

“Do you feel trapped, Margaret?”

“I–” she hesitates. She doesn’t know what to say. She still doesn’t want to admit to him that there may be some things, especially things about the army, that he’s right about. Besides, she gets the feeling this isn’t really about her. When does Pierce ever spare a thought for her unless he absolutely has to?

Still… was it fate that brought her here? Was it fate that brought her Helen, then took her away, then brought her back and took her away again? Was it fate that made her only possible companions in this military cesspit a couple of overgrown children too stupid to see that they’re both completely in love with each other? If this is destiny, she wonders what lessons it’s supposed to be teaching her in the meantime, since otherwise there would be no point. She hasn’t answered Pierce yet, doesn’t seem like she’s going to answer him at all, and besides, he lives nowhere more than in his own head, so he continues.

“Isn’t it– isn’t it at least a little bit messed up if this is my fate? But it’s gotta be it since I sure as hell didn’t choose to be here!”

“But you did, you did choose to be here!”

“Margaret, what the hell–”

“Here, in Tokyo,” she explains. “In this bookshop, with me. Buying me _Macbeth_ , anyway.”

He meets her gaze, his eyes looking rather stony gray in the dim light.

“You really think I would still be here if it was up to me?”

“I just meant– you really think the _army_ decides your fate? Wouldn’t it be God? A force a little more cosmic than President Eisenhower?”

“Oh, one of those exists?”

“Pierce.”

“But that’s all fate is, isn’t it? The story whose ending you can’t change?”

“I– you can’t change the ending of any story,” she says. He looks at her like she’s finally getting it.

“Tell me about it.” He goes back to browsing the shelves, casual as anything. “What story do you feel like you’re in, Margaret? Is it the one you’re living?”

She sighs. “What?”

“I must be Patroclus, or Virgil or something, you know? But I always– I always tell BJ I don’t think I belong in an epic. I’m Terry Wickett, you know? But you– you belonged here before I did, or at least you thought you did, I think. You acted like it, anyway. You wanted us to think you did. You always–” the corners of his mouth twitch up into a hint of a smile. “I think you always wished you could turn me to stone with one glance. You probably still do sometimes, maybe even right now. But if you’re Medusa, I mean, I already said I’m not an epic hero. You couldn’t pay me to be Perseus,” he says.

When she doesn’t respond he looks at her, confused for a minute, before clocking the fact that she only really got half of what he said, which she instantly feels the need to defend.

“I read, you know,” she says.

“I never said you didn’t.”

She turns to face him square on.

“You’re always talking, but you’re never saying anything,” she says. “Don’t you have any ideas that you didn’t read in a book somewhere?”

“I’d rather read a book than the army field manual.” He shrugs. “Besides, I prefer my dialogues Socratic.”

They both turn back to the shelves.

“I watch movies, too, you know,” he says as if that will get him back in her good graces and isn’t in fact extremely condescending.

“Shut up.”

He crouches down and picks something up from the bottom shelf, something very fat and very old that takes a layer of dust with it as it goes.

“Check this out,” he says. “If you want to understand BJ, read this.”

She takes it from him. _The Odyssey_. Pierce has a mythological fixation.

“Who’s trying to understand BJ?” she says evenly, handing him back the tome. His resulting smile looks almost demure. “It’s too long.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll never get through it.” She taps her foot while he reads the back and returns it to its place. “So, what book do I read to understand you?”

“I don’t know,” he says, with a slight groan as he stands. “ _Last of the Mohicans_?”

“Uh-uh. Too easy, Captain.”

“It’s many times I’ve been described that way, never in this context before.”

She almost feels like she’s flirting with him, real flirting, not whatever he’s constantly putting on with the nurses. He’s practically licking his lips, excited by the challenge.

“One book,” she says. “No epics. And no war stories, either. Tell me the book that’s the real you, the one you think you belong in.”

He considers the stacks around them like he thinks he’ll come across the right title by coincidence. She supposes if he really does believe in fate that maybe he thinks he will.

“Can I get back to you?” he says. “It’s kind of a loaded question.”

“Better than a loaded gun.”

“You’re as bad as BJ.”

“High praise.”

“Yeah.”

He buys her the play, and a book of short stories for himself. 

“What about you?” he asks as they leave and return to the main boulevard.

“Me?”

“Your book?”

“I– I’m not sure, yet. But who knows?” she says, brandishing her new _Macbeth_. “Maybe by next week I will.”

“Uh-huh.” He looks skeptical, but doesn’t push it, like she didn’t push him.

They’re walking in friendly, contemplative silence when someone comes up behind her and grabs her ass. She’s so fucking shocked and appalled that she’s lost for words, and goes nearly completely blind with rage when the culprit sidles up in front of them wearing two general’s stars on his shoulder.

“Hey, toots,” he says. “How ‘bout letting a real man buy you a drink?”

“Sorry, fella, I’m already spoken for,” Pierce says, pushing him away lightly with his fingertips, like there was any chance he was talking to him. “And my boyfriend is a football player with a jealous streak, so I’d be careful if I were you.”

“Hey, watch it, buddy.” The general looks him up and down, looking at least like he’s been thrown off his rhythm. “What are you, some kind of sissy?”

Pierce smiles, all but batting his eyelashes. “You wanna find out?”

“Pierce!” She smacks him on the arm and turns to the general. “If you don’t get out of my face in ten seconds I’m gonna bust you up so bad a MASH surgeon won’t know whether sew you up or make you into meatloaf!”

It’s not a particularly potent threat, but General Chaos looks so shocked that she would even talk to him that way that he backs off into this night murmuring something about prudes and fairies.

She dusts off her jacket.

“You have problems with authority,” she says, surprising even herself by how controlled her tone is.

He blinks at her. “Brilliant insight.”

“Hmph.”

“Hey,” he stops her walking. “Are you okay?”

She’s trembling, her every step jolting with adrenaline, but sure, she’s fine. This kind of shit happens all the fucking time. It doesn’t matter how harsh she makes herself, how loud and outspoken and mean and self-assured; if she’s wearing lipstick and a skirt apparently it’s an open invitation.

“I hate men,” she says, because she does.

“Yeah,” he says. “I know.”

“Even you.”

“Yeah. I know.”

She sighs and keeps walking. He doesn’t try to touch her in any way to comfort her; he doesn’t even try to stand close.

“Hey,” he says. “Mind if I try and cheer you up?”

“You’re uniquely qualified,” she deadpans.

“Ha. What do you say we stop in here, pick up a bottle of wine and a couple of fancy cigars and enjoy the evening how it’s meant to be enjoyed, in peaceful contemplation of life and the moonlight.” He leads her into a liquor store.

“You’ve got some goddamn mouth on you, you know that?”

“It’s been said before.”

The guy behind the counter knows him– Margaret doesn’t take time to dwell on how worried that should make her– so agrees to start Pierce a tab when he promises to pay him back on his next visit to the city. She almost believes that he will.

They sit on a bench overlooking the main drag and he peers, perplexed, at the corked bottle of wine like he hadn’t thought of that problem till just now. Margaret produces a Swiss army knife with a corkscrew addition and he grins at her like he never doubted her for a second. He gives her the ceremonial first swig.

“Are you okay?” he says again after a few minutes. It’s dark to tell but she thinks she can see his lips starting to stain purple.

“I will be,” she says, taking the bottle back. He looks over at her.

“I’m sure you will.”

He unwraps one of the cigars in his jacket pocket and bites the tip off.

“You ever think cigars are a little phallic?” he says before immediately putting it in his mouth. She stares at him while he lights it.

“How have you survived this long?”

He laughs. “I don’t know, you’ve seen me in action,” he says. “Besides, I don’t smoke very often.”

She shoves him, laughing. “Imbecile.”

“Oh, Margaret,” he says, leaning back. He puts one foot up on the bench with him and leans his elbow on his knee. “If I could, I would take you away from all this. Send you back home where it’s safe and warm. I think you could learn to love it.”

His smile is safe and warm, too. She used to think he was so cold. She takes the cigar from between his fingers and puffs on it twice herself. She slowly blows a translucent cloud of smoke and watches it dissipate in front of them.

“Shouldn’t you be having this conversation with BJ?” she says.

“Shouldn’t I be having this whole evening with BJ?”

“Fair enough.” She pops the cigar back between his teeth.

Minutes or hours pass in a night that’s not quiet but is noisy in a different way to the camp. It’s noisy with friendly conversation and bicycle bells, soft music wafting out from open windows and lovers kissing each other goodnight and not worrying that it’s the last time they’ll ever see each other. When they finally start walking to the hotel there’s a chill in the air, and she huddles close into Pierce’s side as they go.

“You know,” he says into the darkness, “I don’t think it’s been written yet.”

“What?”

“The book,” he say, “that would explain me. If it does, I certainly haven’t read it.”

“No,” she says, allowing herself to find comfort in the feeling of this strange, funny man’s arm around her. “I guess not.”

_Margaret wakes up in a bed the width and length of her army cot, in the bedroom in her first apartment in Jersey. She’s parched. She’s standing before she’s felt herself get out of bed, and she moves through the apartment toward the kitchen like she’s willing it, almost like she’s floating there, traveling without using her feet._

_There’s a man in the kitchen, at the sink, wearing a blazer and slacks and bright yellow rubber gloves and humming a tune as he washes dishes. She squints and can’t seem to make her eyes focus. The humming gets louder. It’s Pierce._

_“Hawkeye,” she says. She hears a crash outside her bedroom window and when she looks back Pierce is in his fatigues. He’s silent, now. The dishes don’t even clink as he piles the dry ones on the counter._

_He doesn’t see her. He doesn’t seem to hear when she says his name. He’s smiling with one corner of his mouth, the one she can see, but his eyes aren’t quite right. He has green eyes. Another crash. She’s standing at her bedroom window looking down at a jeep wreck on the street. Corpsmen in white coats and surgical gowns rush injured parties away._

_She’s back in the kitchen standing just beside Pierce, a small towel slung over her shoulder. She’s meant to be drying dishes. She hands him a pair of forceps. He’s in scrubs and a surgical cap, a menacing splatter of blood all down his front._

_“Whose?” he says, placing a hand on his stomach and drawing it away, bloody. “Whose?”_

_“His,” she comforts him. “The crash. Downstairs.”_

_He starts to cry, sobs she can tell are loud but which sound far away, like she’s got water in her ears._

_“I thought it was mine,” he chokes out. “Help me.”_

_“Shh,” she says. “You’re fine. It’s his.”_

_There’s a leg in the sink squirting blood from an artery. She reaches for a clamp but hands him a pair of kitchen tongs. He operates._

_“Shh,” she says again. “It’s his. You’re fine.”_

_He yells, “I’m not!”_

She wakes with a start, gasping for air and sitting up straight. She doesn’t feel fine. She’s parched, and drenched in sweat. She puts on a fresh t-shirt and a pair of shorts and her combat boots when they’re the only shoes she can find without putting a light on and goes to the kitchen even though it’s the middle of the night to try and scrounge up some water.

She nearly has a heart attack when she gets there and the lights are on and Pierce is standing at the sink, washing dishes.

“Hawkeye!” she says, and it comes out much more ragged than she’d intended.

He looks up, more intrigued than startled, but at least he heard her unlike in the dream.

“Margaret.” He rinses off a plate and turns around to lean against the counter and watch her pour water into a stray glass from a stray pitcher. He stays silent while she gulps down two full glasses.

“What?” she says.

“Nothing,” he says. “Come here often?”

“Shut up. I needed water. What– what are you doing here?”

He shrugs. “Couldn’t sleep. I figured there would be dishes left over, and nothing’s ever really clean here, except maybe the surgical instruments…. I haven’t done a chore, a regular, normal chore in so long. I guess in kind of a silly way it reminds me of being home.”

“Doing dishes? Don’t you think that’s women’s work?” she says half in bitterness and half as a joke.

He bites the inside of his cheek as he thinks. “I guess it is. Doesn’t mean I don’t do it. I even like it. I don’t know, it’s meditative.”

“Oh, sure, for you it’s meditative, for me it’s a second job!”

“Margaret,” he laughs. “When did I ever tell you you had to wash dishes?”

“Don’t make fun of me. I’m not in the mood.” Apparently while they’ve been talking she’s strode across the room to face him. She doesn’t remember doing that but here she is, looking him in the eye.

“Who’s making fun of you?” he says, holding his hands up in surrender. “Why are you getting mad at me, anyway? Doesn’t it bother you when people buy into all that bullshit, women’s work or whatever?”

“God!” she all but screams. She knows that her reaction doesn’t make sense, but she doesn’t feel entirely in control of her body. She’s having three conversations at once and she doesn’t think any are really with him. “Things used to make sense, you maniac!” She pounds on Hawkeye’s chest once, she can’t help it.

“Oof! Margaret, careful with that, I don’t want Charles to have to operate on me, I think he’ll leave something in there on purpose.”

“I don’t want to hear any stupid jokes!”

“Then you’ve come to the wrong guy.”

“I hate you, you know that? Things used to make sense,” she says again. He’s physically holding her at an arm’s length away.

“And what? It’s my fault that they don’t anymore?”

“Well, if it’s not yours then whose is it?” _Whose?_ She hears his voice from the dream and looks down without thinking to make sure his abdomen isn’t shot up and bleeding.

“You ever consider that they never made sense?” he says.

“Shut up,” she says. “I hate you.”

“I know. You said.”

“No, I don’t.”

“I know.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I know.”

“This place doesn’t confuse you, huh? Doesn’t drive you crazy? Or aren’t you the Hawkeye Pierce we all know and love.”

“Sure, it drives me crazy. It drives me crazier than anyone.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah!” He takes a step closer to her, starting to shut the gap he’d made. “I’m a pacifist, remember? I thought everybody was. Do you realize the culture shock you get when you find out that’s not true? Of course, you know, I get now that that was pretty stupid, once you consider all the wars that have ever been fought. You taught me that, after all.”

She’s gripping her glass so hard she thinks it might shatter.

“Naive,” she says. “You can’t hate this place just ‘cause there’s a war. Just because you’re bitter.”

“Oh, no, no, no, no. I don’t hate this place because I’m bitter, or grumpy, or malcontented or contrary by nature, even if I am those things. I hate this place because people are fucking suffering, and for no good reason as far as I can see, and I can see pretty goddamn far. That’s what doesn’t make sense,” he says. “And that’s exactly how everything’s always been. At least I know that much, now. So who’s naive, huh? Who’s naive?”

_Whose?_

“Yeah?” she says, trying to snap herself out of the fog of late-night. “Well, the good reason is it doesn’t work like that! We can’t just declare peace tomorrow because it’s kind of a complicated situation! You’re not actually some genius, or the only sane man on this base just because you think things would be better if we weren’t at war. You think the negotiators in Panmunjom aren’t trying to end this thing?”

“Ah-ha! No! No, I don’t! I think if they were, it would be over by now! Because it’s not hard, Margaret, it’s not hard! All they’d have to do is– is– is– sustain some ‘losses,’ or whatever– whatever that means.” He gets quiet all of a sudden and speaks in an even tone like he’s trying to convince both of them that he hasn’t completely lost it. “Listen. Whatever they’re saying we’d have to give up, I would give it up in a heartbeat if it meant no more people would die unnecessarily. Hand on heart, I would do that.”

The thing is she believes him, even if she still thinks it’s naive. She’s just not sure why she thinks that anymore.

“God, what the hell is the matter with you?” she throws her cup in the sink and it lands with a crash. “Stop trying to change my worldview.”

She says it because it’s already too late. He probably knows that, too, can tell that he’s won, as if he would sink to the level of caring about _winning_. She won’t give him the satisfaction, anyway. It is simply not fair if she’s supposed to hate herself just because he hates her. But looking at him now, the expression both fierce and weary that wears on his too-rugged face, she sees where his hatred is directed, and it’s not at her; it’s at him. He hates himself so much for being here and it’s not even remotely his choice and she actually feels sick to her stomach thinking about it. Or maybe she’s felt sick since she awoke and is only realizing now.

His hand is white-knuckled gripping the edge of the counter. She places hers over it and feels his fingers relax, even if he doesn’t take her hand. If anything, she pities him a bit. God, but she wouldn’t want to spend any time in his head. She looks up at him and he looks down at her like maybe he pities her as well.

“I dreamt you were in a jeep crash,” she says. “At least, I think that’s what it was.”

He swallows. “Well, I wasn’t. Not recently, anyway. And I won’t be again,” he reassures her. “I’m fine, see?”

 _For now,_ she thinks. They’re all fine for now.

“If you could swallow your ego for a few moments then perhaps you’d realize the extent to which you are not helping!”

Margaret hears Charles bellowing in post-op from Klinger’s office and ducks her head in to see what the fuss is about. Pierce and Winchester are standing over a patient near the door having something adjacent to a screaming match, Pierce leaning casually against the bed frame while Winchester attempts to tower over him.

“Me? Swallow my ego–?” Pierce starts to say, but Winchester interrupts him before he can get the rest of his retort out.

“Certainly! You can cease and desist with your holier-than-thou attitude and the constant vying to be the center of attention, while you’re at it.”

“Holier-than-thou–?”

“Face it, Pierce. If you were half the doctor I am you wouldn’t need to make such a spectacle every time you actually manage to _achieve_ something. Now understand this: I revived this patient easily, and could do it again with my eyes shut!”

“Oh yeah? Well, I can tie a knot in a cherry stem with my tongue.”

“Okay, that’s enough!” Margaret decides it’s time to break this up. “Which of you is even on duty right now?” she says after she strides over to them, and deliberately talks quietly to remind them they’re in a roomful of recuperating patients.

“He is,” Winchester says pointedly, “though he’d be more useful to me if he were–”

“Then you can go, Major,” she says. “Dismissed.”

“Ahem. Need I remind you that you are not in fact qualified to–”

“I _said_ ‘dismissed.’”

“Dismissed,” Winchester repeats. “Right.” He slinks away, but not without another sour glance toward Pierce who wiggles his fingers at him by way of a wave.

“Gee, thanks, Major,” he says. “I don’t know what I’d do without you around to defend my honor.”

“Oh, stuff it.”

“Right.”

He nods. Good old Margaret, he must be thinking, ever the hard-ass. Still, they relax into a comfortable working rhythm, checking patient vitals and making notes and adjustments. They meet again at the back desk. He takes a seat and puts his feet up, and she sits in a chair opposite. He starts folding a paper airplane and she gets deja vu, and he laughs when he sees the stunned look she must be wearing. 

“I guess you remember that night, too,” he says.

“Apparently.”

“We fought.”

“It wasn’t so bad.”

“Not by a long shot.”

When he finishes his first plane he launches it weakly across the desk to land in front of her. She can’t help but smile when she meets his eyes. Maybe he wasn’t being as sarcastic as she’d thought when he’d thanked her for defending him.

“Sorry about all those things Charles said to you,” she says.

“Oh?” He doesn’t look up from the next plane he’s begun folding.

“Really,” she says, sitting back. “You don’t have half the ego problem he does.” Pierce’s eyebrows shoot up. “And he’s the one with the holier-than-thou attitude, too.”

“No kidding,” he says. “Me? The long-suffering pacifist? And I’m not even holier-than-thou? For shame.”

“Okay, don’t push it.”

“Sorry,” he says, looking up and sounding sincere. “Thanks, Margaret.”

“Yes, well.” She flicks through a stray prescription pad. “You really don’t have to let yourself be a punching bag for all these men, you know.”

His expression flirts with confusion. “Don’t I?”

“No, you don’t. You don’t just have to sit there and take it while they say things that are patently false. I don’t take that kind of crap from anybody, I don’t see why you should.”

He rolls his eyes. “Let’s just you not worry about that, okay?”

She finds herself leaning forward in her chair so she sits back again and lets him keep folding, fidgeting, seemingly incapable of letting a moment pass that’s not filled with some kind of movement. She laughs to herself.

“Something you’d like to share with the class?” he says without very much bite.

“It’s just– well, he was basically right about that center of attention thing.”

He sets his jaw. “Yeah, well. I don’t ask for that, you know.”

She starts to laugh again but sees that he might actually be serious.

“Oh, come on. You don’t not ask for it.”

He looks up at her, smiling open-mouthed in disbelief. She recognizes the face from the way he looked for nearly two years running after arriving there.

“Did you just hear yourself? I’m asking for it?”

“Well, I–” she feels nauseous like she does whenever people imply that about her, like the way people treat her is her fault.

“I’m just living my life, and people tell me what I’m asking for and what I’m not.” He messes up a crease in his current airplane and crumples the page before throwing it down on the desk. They sit in silence again, but it’s tense and too tight, like the air itself is threatening to burst through some seam with each passing second. Then they speak at the same time.

“Hawkeye, I’m sorry–”

“I’m sorry, Margaret–”

“Oh,” she says.

He laughs and rolls his eyes, self-effacing this time.

“They’re my issues,” he says. “I shouldn’t take them out on you. It’s not as if I’ve always been the most, shall we say, empathetic? Towards you.”

“No,” she agrees, but her tone is lighthearted, giddy with forgiveness that he’s just about earned.

“But, uh, I believe you were apologizing, too?” he prompts her with a cheeky smile.

“Pierce.” She sighs. “I did used to think you had everything so easy and used all your free time to be awful to me just because.”

“Oh, well, that’s definitely true.”

“Shut up. If I’d known how… upset–”

“Tortured? Downtrodden? Heartsick? Cracked? Bent–?”

“Shut up! I was _saying_ , if I’d known how hard you were really taking this life here… well, I probably still would’ve have been horrible.”

“Ha!” He laughs for real and smacks the desk once in genuine surprise.

“Listen! I’m sorry– actually, it’s less that I’m sorry. I would say the way we used to be wasn’t entirely my fault. But I am sorry that it’s rough for you, and that you’re so… different. That’s not your fault.”

He nods like he’s taking time to process what she’s said.

“Thanks,” he says. “I think. But that doesn’t really bother me, you know, being different. Not like it bothers you, anyway.”

“I’m trying to have it bother me less.”

A grin spreads across his face.

“That’s great, Margaret. You’re gonna love it this side of the yellow brick road.”

“God! But the way you act, can you blame us for thinking you’ve got the whole damn world at your disposal? You walk around like the kind of guy who does, a complete and total hedonist.”

“Maybe I am.”

“Pierce!”

“Margaret, I act like a camp homosexual at all times.” He shrugs. “People see what they want to see.”

He seems like he might have more to say on that subject, but he gets distracted when Hunnicutt comes through the door with Kellye.

“Hey Hawk, Margaret,” he says. “We’re here to relieve you.”

“That’s a relief,” Pierce says, and starts heading for the door.

“Oh, wait. It’s raining something awful out there. Here,” Hunnicutt says. “Take my jacket.” He peels it off and hands it to Pierce.

“Hey, thanks, Beej. Margaret, you wanna huddle under here for warmth?”

She rolls her eyes, but all things considered she would prefer getting back to her tent dry.

It’s pouring rain and she crowds close next to Pierce in a desperate attempt not to get soaked. They get stopped by Klinger in the middle of the compound who has to ask Hawkeye about something, and while they stand there he holds Hunnicutt’s jacket over her and Klinger while the rain runs down his back.

Hawkeye is just such a funny one. Even when he hated her he would put it aside to care for her. He took out her appendix, didn’t he? He stepped up during the flu epidemic and at the aid station and he tells her when she’s changed his mind and he never lies to her, she doesn’t think. And how he’s standing in the torrential downpour holding a jacket over her even though she’s never once admitted he might be right about their most fundamental disagreement, the all-powerful all-encompassing and omnipresent Army. 

He drops her off at her tent and wishes her a good evening with a cheery signature wave and she realizes that they aren’t just friendly, but friends. She is friends with Hawkeye Pierce, and he’s friends with her. She’s stunned herself into silence and she’s about to just let that be that and maybe write a diary entry about it when her gaze lands on the copy of _Macbeth_ he bought her. They’d never had a real conversation about it; she hadn’t wanted to admit how many times she’d had to stop midway through and snap the thin book shut to catch her breath at the harrowing depictions of madness, the senseless violence and anguish, the chills she felt through her spine when she could line up the words on the page with the haunting images she remembered from the production they’d seen.

She picks up the play and stares at the front cover before tossing it down on her bed and throwing open the door of her tent. She runs to the center of the compound, her clothes and hair sticking to her with rainwater, till she arrives at the Swamp and throws open that door as well. Pierce is pulling on a dry t-shirt and shaking out his hair like a wet dog when she startles him like that.

“Margaret–?”

“Hawkeye, we’re friends!”

His posture straightens for a moment and he looks like he’s trying to stop his eyes from growing wide.

“Right. Is that– is that a problem?”

“Yes! You go against everything I stand for!”

He relaxes and his shoulders slump down again.

“Haven’t we been over this? If nothing makes sense then I definitely think we’re allowed to be friends. Besides, I want to.” He pulls on his robe and sits cross legged on his cot.

“Oh,” she says. She brushes a damp lock out of her face and he stands back up to hand her a towel.

“You know this isn’t a new development, right?” he says. “I mean, you know about my big stupid crush on BJ, don’t you? I should fucking hope we’re friends.”

She dries her hair and tries not to feel stupid. It’s just that she lost so many years of her life when everyone else was going barhopping and traveling Europe and making mistakes and new friends and relationships to the damn army where it feels like all the friends you make are just of convenience. Of course, that’s never how she felt about Lorraine, and certainly not about Helen. That’s not how Hawkeye and BJ see each other. In fact, even though everyone here has been thrown together in the most distasteful of circumstances they’ve also taught her exactly what friendship is supposed to feel like.

“Listen, this may surprise you,” she says like she knows it won’t, “but I don’t– I don’t have a lot of friends.”

“I know,” Hawkeye says, and takes the towel back. “So what?”

“Well, you do.”

“Sure, and you’re one of them.”

“We shouldn’t want anything to do with each other,” she says.

“But we do.”

“If this was real life, we–”

“But it’s not.”

“It is for me.”

“Yeah, well.”

They’re still standing in the center of the tent, her soaking wet and him clutching the used towel talking about the nature of life and friendship.

“Well, thanks,” she says, indicating the towel and maybe the whole thing.

“Anytime.”

She turns on her heels to leave but he stops her at the door.

“Wait! You know, if you ever want to come work in a real hospital or anything back in the States you just need to– just give me a call.”

She didn’t even know he was capable of envisioning life after the war.

“I thought you’d never want to see me again after we go home.”

“I– Where’d you get that idea?”

“I don’t know.”

“Friends, remember?”

“Right,” she says. “Friends.”

Another long moment passes where she can tell he thinks she’s genuinely insane for not understanding that’s what was going on between them. She doesn’t have time to explain just how alone she was for so long approached only by people who wanted her or her father to help them get a leg up in the army, or by old friends of her father who were interested in propositioning her in different ways. Instead she asks if she can borrow his rain poncho to go back home, and he obliges, because they’re friends, whatever that means. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the Macbeth in Japanese thing inspired by the fact that I saw Macbeth the opera one time which is in Italian and the subtitle screen for my seat was broken but I still thoroughly enjoyed it bc I’d read it before BUT I think if I hadn’t I wouldn’t have had a goddamn clue what was going on
> 
> up next, i have apparently written what can only be described as a slow burn friendship fic, so we get some of the payoff in the end <3


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